Tapping into a potential hire's Facebook profile, or Twitter account, for information means you can learn more about a candidate's personality than you might get with just a job interview. A Facebook profile, or collection of tweets, can offer additional insight into whether or not a person might be a good fit with a corporation's culture. On the flip side, a thorough check of one's social media footprint might also uncover some serious missteps, or questionable judgments, a potential hire has made in their past. Having the benefit of finding this BEFORE a hire has been made may make some organizations feel thankful they've dodged the bullet of a potential disastrous addition to the work ranks.

[See also: Checking job candidates' FB pages can come back to haunt you]

But in between the good and the bad information is plenty of data that is illegal to view if you are making a hiring decision. And even if a hiring manager honestly does not use off-limits material, once they have seen it on Facebook, it can become grounds for a lawsuit.

"It not about the medium," according to Victoria Mavis, president & senior consultant at Core People Resources, a human-resource-services firm in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania."It's about what you do with the information you get. Whether I get it off the background information check or off of Facebook, is it information I should have access to in the first place?"

For a little guidance on navigating the new landscape of information out there on potential hires, we spoke with human resource and labor law experts on ways to be smart when using Facebook and other social media to check up on job candidates.