Most Australian employers are already checking candidates’ social media. The problem is how they’re doing it. Around 73% of Australian organisations now use social media somewhere in their recruitment process, and a large share of hiring managers admit to personally scrolling through a candidate’s Instagram or Facebook before making a decision. That’s not the risky part. The risky part is what a manager can’t help but see while they’re there, and what happens if that sighting quietly shapes a hiring decision.
What actually happens when a manager googles a candidate
Picture the ordinary version of this. A hiring manager has two strong candidates and, before the final call, has a look at both of their public profiles. One candidate’s Facebook shows a baby shower from six months ago. The other’s LinkedIn mentions a recent stint of personal leave. Neither piece of information was relevant to the job. But it’s now sitting in the manager’s head, and human decision-making doesn’t come with a filter that reliably keeps irrelevant information from influencing a judgement call, even an unconscious one.
That’s the exposure. It’s not that looking at a public profile is illegal. It’s that once a manager has seen a public profile, it becomes that much harder to argue that the profile didn’t factor in the decision.
“Yes, I saw it, but I didn’t care…”
Under section 351 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth), an employer cannot take adverse action against a prospective employee because of protected attributes. That list is long: race, sex, sexual orientation, age, physical or mental disability, marital status, family or carer’s responsibilities, pregnancy, religion, political opinion, and more. The Fair Work Ombudsman is explicit that this covers hiring decisions directly, not just conduct once someone is employed, and includes simply not hiring someone because of one of these attributes.
Deciding not to progress a candidate has nothing to do with why a manager scrolled their profile in the first place. However, if a rejected candidate later raises a complaint, the parties may have to give detailed evidence about what information was seen and what information was considered. If the employer’s hiring manager has to admit that they saw the candidate’s pregnancy announcement, their religious affiliation, or a post about a disability the week before the decision was made, the candidate’s case is half-way to being made out. The employer’s argument that “I didn’t let it influence me” is a more difficult argument to win than, “I didn’t see it.”
Informal screening is also inconsistent, which creates its own risk
Beyond the discrimination exposure, ad hoc social media screening tends to happen unevenly across a hiring process. One candidate gets Googled thoroughly, another doesn’t, depending on which recruiter has five minutes free that day. That inconsistency is its own governance problem: if a business can’t show every candidate for a role was assessed the same way, it’s hard to demonstrate the process was fair at all, regardless of the outcome.
There’s also a timing issue. A years-old post doesn’t necessarily say anything about who someone is now, but a manager scrolling casually has no structured way to weigh that. A formal process can be built to look for genuinely current, role-relevant risk indicators, rather than whatever happens to surface first in a five-minute scroll.
There’s a privacy obligation sitting underneath this too
Discrimination risk isn’t the only legal angle here. Collecting and using someone’s personal information, including what’s visible on a public social media profile, falls within the scope of the Australian Privacy Principles once an employer starts systematically gathering it for a hiring decision. That doesn’t mean a manager glancing at a public LinkedIn profile is breaching privacy law. It does mean that once social media research becomes a routine, repeated part of how an organisation screens candidates, it starts to look like the kind of personal information handling the Privacy Principles are designed to govern, and an ad hoc process run by whichever manager happens to do the Googling has no consistent record of what was collected, why, or how long it was kept.
A structured process handles this by design. It applies the same defined scope to every candidate, keeps a record of what was actually assessed, and doesn’t leave a trail of screenshots and half-remembered impressions sitting in someone’s personal browser history.
What a structured Social Media Check actually changes
The fix isn’t to stop looking at public information altogether. Plenty of it is genuinely useful, and ignoring it isn’t realistic advice for most hiring teams. The fix is running it as a defined, consistent process rather than an individual manager’s personal research project.
A structured check narrows the search to specific, pre-defined risk categories, such as hate speech, violence, harassment or serious misconduct, rather than a general character impression formed by scrolling. It’s applied the same way for every candidate in a role, which closes the consistency gap. And critically, it separates the search from the decision-maker: the person assessing a candidate’s suitability for the job isn’t the same person who was exposed to their pregnancy announcement or their political views while looking for something else entirely.
Kinatico CVCheck’s Social Media Check is built around that separation. It uses a defined set of risk classifications to review a candidate’s public posts and images, rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be reviewing the application that day, and returns a report built for the decision at hand rather than a general impression of the person.
If you appreciated this article, we recommend you also read our earlier paper on why a single check is rarely the full picture when it comes to pre-employment screening. The same logic applies here: informal, unstructured checking creates gaps and risk that a defined process is built to close.
Already running informal social media checks and not sure how exposed that leaves you? Kinatico CVCheck’s team can walk you through how a structured check compares.
References
1. Northbridge Recruitment, “Social Media Recruitment in Australia,” citing LinkedIn survey data on Australian employer social media recruitment use and discrimination/bias concerns.
2. Fair Work Ombudsman, “Protection from discrimination at work.”
3. Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) s 351, via AustLII: “Discrimination.”
4. Fair Work Commission, “Discrimination.”
5. Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, “Australian Privacy Principles.”
