The low-cost check that could save your company from a high-cost mistake
Hiring the wrong person isn’t always a performance issue. Sometimes it’s a reputational one.
Picture this. A candidate clears your reference and criminal background checks. Their CV is solid. They interview well. But two weeks after joining, a customer forwards a screenshot of the new hire’s old social media post — one that includes hate speech, conspiracy theories, or content that undermines your company’s values.
Now you’re in damage control mode. HR is involved. Legal is briefed. Colleagues are uncomfortable. The hire is quietly let go. Internally, you’re left wondering: could this have been avoided?
The answer is yes — and at a much lower cost than you might expect.
The cost of a bad hire isn’t just operational
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a bad hire can cost up to 30% of the employee’s annual salary. But that’s just the internal cost — onboarding, training, lost productivity, and rehiring. The reputational cost is harder to measure and potentially far greater.
A survey by CareerBuilder found that 54% of employers have decided not to hire a candidate based on what they found on social media. It’s not uncommon to see companies lose clients, face PR backlash, or trigger internal investigations over content that was public all along.
What happens when it goes wrong?
Social media posts have real-life consequences. The UK has begun a crackdown on social media posts due to inflammatory hate posts made that caused wide-spread rioting across the country last summer, resulting in violence, damage to property, racist attacks, and more – showing just how powerful a single post can be and the damage it can cause.
One of the most publicised cases in the UK involved a TV show called The Apprentice, where doctor Asif Munaf was cast as a contestant. The BBC filmed the entire show with the doctor appearing until he was fired. However, when the show was broadcast a year later, complaints came flooding in – viewers had found Munaf’s social media and found anti-semitic tweets. Had the BBC conducted a quick social media check on all contestants before casting, they could have cast a different contestant and negated reputational risk.
From a reputational perspective, the BBC faced backlash over its decision to cast The Apprentice contestant Asif Munaf, after viewers discovered a series of antisemitic social media posts from his past. Although the show had been filmed months earlier and Munaf had already been fired during the season, complaints surged once it aired. The incident prompted a public apology from the BBC and raised serious questions about their vetting process. A simple social media check before casting could have helped avoid the reputational fallout.
The risk is public. The cost is preventable.
Social media checks help you identify behavioural red flags that traditional checks miss — before they become part of your team.
These include:
- Hate speech or discriminatory views
- Harassment or violent language
- Illegal activity
- Content that breaches confidentiality or conflicts with professional conduct
A structured check provides a report that flags only job-relevant concerns, redacts protected characteristics, and gives you enough context to assess severity. It’s not about penalising someone for a joke from 10 years ago. It’s about protecting your people, your brand, and your customers.
A small step with disproportionate value
With Veremark, social media checks are fast, structured, and low-friction. Most results are returned within 1–3 working days. The reports show flagged posts with timestamps, screenshots, and indicators of whether the content was original, shared, or liked. You also get behavioural categories, a word cloud of recurring themes, and a sentiment timeline.
There’s no need for your team to conduct manual reviews or sift through personal profiles. The process is consistent, compliant, and designed to support fair, evidence-based decisions.
Why wait until something goes wrong?
Many teams skip social media screening because it feels invasive or complicated. But in practice, it’s one of the simplest and most cost-effective ways to reduce reputational risk at the point of hire.
If you’ve invested in reference checks, criminal checks, and right-to-work verification, this is the logical next step.
If you're exploring how this could work in your hiring process, you can book a short consultation with our team.
For a closer look at what social media checks include and how employers use them in practice, download our guide.
Download the guide
A Practical Guide to Social Media Checks for Employers
This resource offers practical clarity:
- What social media checks can legally and ethically include
- What actually shows up in a structured report — and how to interpret it
- How to screen without bias or exposure to protected characteristics
- The implementation steps many companies overlook
- Real-world examples of incidents that could have been avoided
Built for HR, compliance, and hiring teams that want to get this right — every time.
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FAQs
FAQs
This depends on the industry and type of role you are recruiting for. To determine whether you need reference checks, identity checks, bankruptcy checks, civil background checks, credit checks for employment or any of the other background checks we offer, chat to our team of dedicated account managers.
Many industries have compliance-related employment check requirements. And even if your industry doesn’t, remember that your staff have access to assets and data that must be protected. When you employ a new staff member you need to be certain that they have the best interests of your business at heart. Carrying out comprehensive background checking helps mitigate risk and ensures a safer hiring decision.
Again, this depends on the type of checks you need. Simple identity checks can be carried out in as little as a few hours but a worldwide criminal background check for instance might take several weeks. A simple pre-employment check package takes around a week. Our account managers are specialists and can provide detailed information into which checks you need and how long they will take.
All Veremark checks are carried out online and digitally. This eliminates the need to collect, store and manage paper documents and information making the process faster, more efficient and ensures complete safety of candidate data and documents.
In a competitive marketplace, making the right hiring decisions is key to the success of your company. Employment background checks enables you to understand more about your candidates before making crucial decisions which can have either beneficial or catastrophic effects on your business.
Background checks not only provide useful insights into a candidate’s work history, skills and education, but they can also offer richer detail into someone’s personality and character traits. This gives you a huge advantage when considering who to hire. Background checking also ensures that candidates are legally allowed to carry out certain roles, failed criminal and credit checks could prevent them from working with vulnerable people or in a financial function.
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