If you are an HR person or a hiring manager, do you owe it to your company to Google candidates and get as much information as possible about them? The question may not be as easy as you think as Kris Dunn explores on Fistful of Talent. He gives you three reasons why you should:

1.  You are an agent of your company - it’s your job to get the inside scoop on candidates.  The world’s not always a happy place.  Put your helmet on and get in the game.

2.  The legal risk of not doing it will ultimately outweigh the risk of doing it. Let’s say you hire a stalker, who ultimately starts stalking one of your employees.  Turns out you could have seen an article with the employee’s name in it by googling.  Didn’t show up in your background check because it was too fresh.  Think the liability is stronger by googling or not googling?  If you said not googling, go back to the start of the article and read it again.

3.  You’ve got cover, my friend. There are hundreds of reasons you might reject a candidate, and you don’t tell the candidate any of them.  Does “We love your background, but we have elected to make an offer to a candidate who is a more direct match to our needs..” ring a bell?

I generally agree that Googling a candidate is a good idea. The time investment and possible discoveries are worth the legal risk. I would say there are more pitfalls than Kris leads on to. Here is what I would recommend:

1. You aren’t a private investigator. If you are and you’ve happened to fall into HR, my apologies. Getting an inside scoop and stalking someone online is a thin line. There is a voyeuristic quality to it that may suck you in from a simple Google search to spending hours figuring out this person’s life story. Get in and get out with the information you need.
2. It does open you up to more liability. Don’t let anybody poo poo you on that. Whether your company has liability because you could have figured out somebody was a stalker on the internet is yet to be tested to the best of my knowledge. What has been tested is stumbling across protected status information and opening yourself up to major liability. Be careful with the information you receive even if you never intend to use it.
3. The only reason that matters is the one you used. If you disqualify someone because of party photos on the internet, don’t fool yourself into thinking you had suspicions or you wouldn’t have hired them anyway. While I certainly wouldn’t recommend telling them the exact reasons, lying to yourself only makes for a major lesson in ethics down the road.

Get a background check, Google the candidate and make the right decision. But let’s not forget that there are multiple issues to consider here.