Jobvite’s sixth annual Social Recruiting Survey came out this week and starts with the headline “[a]nyone not leveraging social referrals is behind the curve. “  The survey found that 94% of recruiters are now using or plan to use social media in their recruitment efforts.

Ok.  That’s probably not that newsworthy as it makes intuitive sense.  Social media is widely used and accepted.  Makes sense that recruiters would be using it to source candidates.

What is newsworthy and should cause in-house counsel, employment lawyers, HR managers and business leaders across the U.S. to make sure their recruiters are well trained is captured on page 8 of the report:

• 28% of recruiters say they would react negatively to a candidate’s “overtly religious posts/tweets.”
• 2% of recruiters say they would react positively.
• 55% say they would be neutral. 

I’ve copied the full chart from the report and taken the liberty of adding a big red arrow to the problematic finding.  I’ve also added a quote from the “Questions and Answers:  Religious Discrimination in the Workplace” page of the EEOC’s website.

Of course, the EEOC’s Q&A is based on Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964 (“Title VII”), which prohibits employers from discriminating against employees or prospective employees because of their religion.

To read the chart in its original form without my commentary you can download a free copy of the full survey report by clicking here.  For readers who would like to use the one-pager I created to do some training, you can download a pdf by clicking here.

Happy training!