Ask Lemmy

Entirely depends on the employer.

Obviously this is going to depend on country, locality, industry, and specific company.

I live in the US in an East Coast state. I don't know anyone who gets drug tested anymore, unless they are working in a sensitive industry (aerospace, as guided by the FAA) or have an accident on the job and are tested after the fact.

There are overlapping state and national laws. My state has legalized marijuana, but the national government, via the FAA, says "No" if I work in certain jobs. I do work in aerospace but not in one of those jobs that the FAA cares about drug testing for.

I always assume my social media will be searched.

Depends on the job/industry. For instance, I'm in the US.

For IT. Neither of those have come up. But a lot of my jobs have been references by friends or people I've worked with.

For driving commercially, drug tests are required for your license. And companies are required by law to do so many tests a quarter.

I've been drug tested for every "real" job I've had outside of food/retail, but only as a pre-employment formality, even when working for a company in a legal state. I've passed it through abstention, a niacin flush, and even just using synthetic.

Can't tell you about social media, cuz I don't have any associated with my name other than my lunatic profile.

No.

However, anything that requires security clearance or is PR for the employer will (in the US at least).

If you want a job that needs clearance, I recommend closing your social media now, stopping all drugs now, and wait at least 7 years before applying to those jobs. Limit travel. Work to have any mental health records destroyed (idk if you can actually do this) and cancel therapy. Stop using Lemmy, and don't do anything that remotely indicates that you associate with divergent cultures (i.e. communism or anarchism).

For PR - just stay off social media and drugs and don't talk about work except in an extremely positive way.

Depends. If you're looking to work somewhere that has a public image, social media is likely to be a factor. Anything involving safety or serious liability will need drug screenings. Outside of that, it depends on how much the company is willing to pay for screenings. They have to pay for them for candidates, and they're not cheap. I've done work in background check software and can tell you costs range from the low hundreds to sometimes over a thousand bucks per candidate, particularly if a candidate has gone by a lot of names and lived in a lot of places. You end up with a big combinatorial of identities to do criminal records requests for from different jurisdictions across the country. Some jurisdictions require a phone call to request records, and I can think of at least one where someone has to literally go pick up documents from a courthouse in person. On top of that, some drug panels are quite expensive. Social media review usually takes a lot of a real person's time to go through; hard to automate if you want to be thorough beyond just pointing at a Facebook profile to scrape and feed through an LLM, and some kinds of posts are relevant to some employers vs others.

If you're concerned, 7 years is the industry norm for how far back they consider your past unless it's for like a professional certification or degree.

If you're interviewing with someone under 40, the interviewer is going to look you up on social media. Almost definitively, I do not know anyone who doesn't do a quick google search before the interview. May or may not be anything official at an HR level, and for me personally, unless I see something crazy and you're in a visible role, I'm probably not going to say anything.

We had a guy once who thought his social media was private and he was very wrong. Their interests were stacked pretty heavily towards weed and guns. Would not be a huge problem if it was private and they were able to abstain long enough to satisfy the potential drug screen, but with the amount of visibility, if anything came up, people might start searching for someone to blame for not doing their due diligence when hiring and my team would probably end up being the scapegoat.

As far as the drug screen specifically, I do not understand the methodology HR uses to determine whether someone needs to be drug screened during on-boarding. Maybe they know something I don't, but it seems completely random.

tl;dr: Someone will almost definitely go through it and unless it's actually for real private, you probably aren't as clever as you think in hiding it. The bar though for social media in my experience is pretty low.

Drug tests usually have to be disclosed, so you can check for that. But don’t just ask them straight up if they drug test—that is incredibly suspicious. Instead ask for their policies and/or employee handbook where that will be disclosed. Generally you should try to stay sober while job hunting for several reasons, primarily because some tests can detect residual evidence for months.

Regarding social media, that depends. It’s best to just assume they would and clean up anything that’s public. You should probably do this all the time, but doubly so when job hunting.

Current or past employees (would-be-peers, not managers) are an excellent resource for all kinds of information, including this stuff.

What country are you in? What kind of job are you applying for? What are the drug laws in your area and/or nation? What industry are the jobs within? Many industries are legally bound to drug test. Does the company do this to prevent legal liability for some reason? Perhaps company reputation, dependability, and/or cost management are important factors for them . Etc etc.

In short, depending on the area, drug testing is pretty normal.

As for social media, always assume that your employer, co-workers, and anyone in your life will look up your social media and use it as a basis for understanding and assessing you. If you're concerned about what people will think, then privatize and/or anonymize your social media use.

I've only ever had to pass a drug test for low paying hourly jobs. I've never been tested for a salaried position.

I've been through about 8 tech jobs in my nearing twenty years of experience. The only drug test I ever had was when I worked at a tech company for a hospital, and I declined.

Even the gov job did not require a drug test. Maybe because it wasn't federal government, or there was some loophole with contractors, or something else. I definitely had friends who had to do drug tests with government contracts.

I typically laugh at drug tests. I live in a legal state, I don't use anything, and the fact that you can take cocaine every day for a year and stop for a few days, and you'll still pass. It's stupid and I'm fortunate to be in a position where it's an extremely rare question to ask in my industry.

My current boss looked me up on Facebook, I’d say that was a bad thing in most cases, but he’s a great boss.

In IT, I always have to complete a background check and a drug screening whenever I start a new job. I've never heard of an employer reviewing someone's social media before, but I guess it could happen. This account is a bit of an outlier, and my social media usually centers on tech stuff.

Never in my experience (as a software developer) but that might just be Canada

Drug testing is pretty common. IDK about social media shit; but then, I don't use my real info on any social media thing so they couldn't find me even if they looked.

Ok, do you have any social media where you can be (easily) identified? I mean, full name, your actual picture, searchable by phone number/e-mail that you gave your potential employer, etc...

All my social media is private so they wouldn't be able to look me up, but assume they do if they can. Drug tests are commonplace in my state. The only ones that might not are under the table jobs.

As someone in a salaried tech job, I’ve only had one require drug tests: an investment management company. They said it was an SEC requirement

I’ve never had a company ask about my social media accounts. I m sure there’s some sort of background check but I have no way of knowing

At my job everyone gets a background check before they start. I assume it includes at least a basic web search for their name, which could potentially turn up social media but to my knowledge its primarily focused on turning up legal issues. If the job involves handling money I believe its more thorough than the standard background check but I don't know the specifics. You only get drug tested if your job requires operating heavy machinery or employer owned vehicles, or if you're involved in an accident where employer insurance gets involved you can be required to do a drug test after the accident.