Social Networking Sites Getting Risky For Recruiting 227
onehitwonder writes "While many recruiters and HR managers are taking advantage of the Web and online social networks to screen candidates for positions inside their organizations, a bank in Texas has decided that using social networking websites in its recruiting process is too risky legally. Amegy Bank of Texas now prohibits internal HR staff and external recruiters from using social networking sites in its hiring process. Amegy's decision to ban the use of social networking sites in its hiring process demonstrates its respect for prospective employees' privacy. It also sends a message to the employers and recruiters using social networks to snoop into job seekers' personal lives that their actions border on discrimination and could get them in a lot of legal trouble."
Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people put a lot of info on their social networking sites. Some of it is information that is protected under discrimination laws. Now even if your HR people are squeaky clean about it and ignore all that, the problem could be proving it. You check up on someone's page and find out that they do something you don't like, and that you can discriminate on. However also on that page it lets you know they are Mormon. You don't hire them, they sue you for religious discrimination because your organization has a bunch of Catholics at the top.
Well the lawsuit is now a problem. They'll claim you found out they were Mormon and that's the reason you won't hire them. You claim it is for another reason, maybe something they've now removed from their page. Well it's now "He said, she said." Maybe the jury doesn't buy that the other thing was what you cared about and all of a sudden you owe a bunch of money.
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The US also uses a jury system, and in cases of discrimination it is not unheard of to use circumstancial evidence to rile up a jury and get a conviction. If your company actively uses a social networking site which has this kind of information, it might not be difficult to paint it as "poor innocent standing up to big evil discriminatory corporation" and, with cases based largely on circumstantial evidence, that can be a death sentance.
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because companies (big ones in particular) have to carefully craft standard forms and questions for HR purposes that their lawyers "guarantee" will follow all the applicable discrimination laws, in all the states. Sticking to the forms keeps the company out of dutch.
Going "off-script" to Myspace is just begging for trouble because your company already made a policy about what items you were using for job determination. In short why are you snooping other than to verify the facts on the pre-approved forms t
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah! Then you can claim that you were discriminated on your schizophrenia!
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Don't you mean multiple personality disorder? Its completely different from schizophrenia.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
It really depends on if the voices in your head tell you to do things, or if they just get off their lazy asses, take over and do it themselves!
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
However also on that page it lets you know they are Mormon. You don't hire them, they sue you for religious discrimination because your organization has a bunch of Catholics at the top.
Usually, to win that kind of lawsuit, you have to prove at least one of two things:
1. You were discriminated against &/or
2. There exists a pattern of discrimination
So unless the company comes out and says "we saw [X] on [social networking site] and that's why you are not getting hired," a lawsuit has almost no chance.
/And trying to prove a pattern of discrimination is a long and expensive process.
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Informative)
Coincidentally, I just attended a CLE that touched upon this issue today. The recommendation was that if you use any data miners to go out and look for damning information on social networking sites, they should be people who are well versed in the prohibited bases for not hiring people. Additionally, these people should NOT be the hiring decision makers. Essentially, these people would forward legally appropriate information to the decision makers who would then use the sanitized information in the hiring process (i.e. quotes about how the candidate financed his BMW from his current employer's cash reserves).
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Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm confused as to why anyone needs to provide ANY reason why someone didn't get hired. Getting fired is a separate issue. You need documentation to back up the decision, etc, etc. But hiring someone? Heck, just because you turn in an application and have an interview doesn't mean you've got the job, especially in this economy when there are 100 applicants applying for a single position. The chances are very good that you won't get it, even if they love you.
-Restil
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I'm confused as to why anyone needs to provide ANY reason why someone didn't get hired.
There are city, state, and federal laws that specifically say you cannot not hire someone based on certain reasons such as but not limited too race, religion, sex, age, and in some places credit history or prior contracts and so on.
There is a slew of legislation [wikipedia.org] on this and varies from state to state.
When you do not hire someone, in truth you have to have a valid reason or the person you didn't hire can sue you for violat
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Well the lawsuit is now a problem. They'll claim you found out they were Mormon and that's the reason you won't hire them. You claim it is for another reason, maybe something they've now removed from their page. Well it's now "He said, she said." Maybe the jury doesn't buy that the other thing was what you cared about and all of a sudden you owe a bunch of money.
BRAD What do you want?
LESTER One year's salary, with benefits.
BRAD That's not going to happen.
LESTER Well, what do you say I throw in
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Actually it's the other way around. The prospective employee would have to prove that their religion was the reason they weren't hired. That whole innocent until proven guilty thing.
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I believe this depends on the state as well. In my state it is basically "hire at will". An employee can be basically not hired or fired as long as there is no obvious illegal discrimination. However, most companies usually wait until there is a sizable amount of documented disciplinary actions before firing. That way the ex-employee will have a much more difficult time of getting unemployment benefits.
I've heard that some states are very different and that there are more employee-favored regulations, such
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Where the hell do you live?
Race, gender and (I'm pretty sure) religious discrimination when selecting people for jobs is illegal under EU law as well. In most of the civilised world you can sue over that sort of thing.
Private company or not, you don't get to decide you won't hire blacks or women.
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Personally I wouldn't avoid hiring someone due to religious belief that would just be stupid. The way I see it, I just happen to know more about the universe than they do. Just as someone else might know more about Cisco routers than I do.
I believing in fairy tails is kinda dumb, but it doesn't necessarily make them unfit. However I still think it's an employers right to choose.
"A bank in Texas" (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they have changed the laws since I was last there, but "a bank in Texas" might be roughly analogous, capital-wise, to a manufacturing plant in my local area. So one bank in Texas setting a policy is hardly big news.
Re:"A bank in Texas" (Score:4, Informative)
This is where RTFA comes in handy. The first paragraph of TFA:
You won't find Amegy Bank of Texas CEO Paul B. Murphy Jr. uploading new profile pictures onto Facebook or linking Twitter feeds to a MySpace page. Murphy, who heads the 87-branch, Houston-based bank, isn't personally involved in the brave new world of social networking Web sites, but he certainly knows what they are. And thanks to his lawyer, his bank is successfully navigating the legal land mines they can contain.
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Re:"A bank in Texas" (Score:4, Funny)
In Texas!!?! A bank in Texas setting a sane, progressive policy like this is akin to a mosque declaring an equal rights policy in Saudi Arabia! This is up there with Gorbachev declaring perestroika!
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Social networking sites should file suits (Score:3, Interesting)
It is REALLY hard to prove discrimination as it is. When it is discovered, it should then be actionable in some way. As it stands, there is probably nothing in the law books that would stand against it, but social networking sites could potentially show damages because of their use being discouraged.
Personally? I don't appear on any social networking sites... other than this one. If you really want to know who I am, you gotta know who I am and then read all my comments. But there are no pictures and so to confirm my identity would not be a simple matter for most.
(Please, this is not a challenge...)
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It is REALLY hard to prove discrimination as it is. When it is discovered, it should then be actionable in some way. As it stands, there is probably nothing in the law books that would stand against it, but social networking sites could potentially show damages because of their use being discouraged.
Personally? I don't appear on any social networking sites... other than this one. If you really want to know who I am, you gotta know who I am and then read all my comments. But there are no pictures and so to confirm my identity would not be a simple matter for most.
(Please, this is not a challenge...)
Of course it is not a challenge. Everyone here is a twitter sockpuppet.
Re:Social networking sites should file suits (Score:4, Insightful)
They can say they will ban it (Score:5, Insightful)
But just like discrimination against age, disability, religion and race they just have to pay lip service and any employer can discriminate all they like.
As a hiring manager, I really hate HR! (Score:5, Interesting)
The reality is that I am a high school drop-out, and I am a Chief Technology Officer. I didn't get there by starting a company, I was recruited by the company itself. I have 15+ years of experience (my first "contract" position was when I was 15). Oh, and I'm 32 years old now.
I once was given a job offer and then they rescinded it because I did not have a high school diploma. Were they wrong? You decide. I am where I am because I have the skills, experience and am damn good at my job.
Re:As a hiring manager, I really hate HR! (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably not. You sound like an asshole. ;-)
Re:As a hiring manager, I really hate HR! (Score:5, Funny)
Sometimes an asshole is the right guy for the job.. if its a job in HR, for example.
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Why does he sound like an asshole? I don't get that impression.
Re:As a hiring manager, I really hate HR! (Score:4, Informative)
Well, there's careful mention of his exact accomplishments and the age at which he made them, calling a whole group of people he I guess manages useless, and the in-your-face rhetorical questioning about whether he is really as awesome as he says he is. I'd find it insufferable.
Re:As a hiring manager, I really hate HR! (Score:5, Funny)
careful mention of his exact accomplishments and the age at which he made them
Ha! By that metric Steve Jobs, Hans Reiser, and Stephen Wolfram are all assholes.. oh, I see now, never mind.
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Actually, I was just kidding, but now that you mention it, he does sound like kind of an asshole.
Re:As a hiring manager, I really hate HR! (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't tell if the purpose of this post was to brag about yourself or hate on human resources. Either way it's pointless.
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What if you believe that human resources is a useless department, and you want to explain why so. How do you go about doing it?
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Ohh, the HR lovers are coming out in force today.
Just kidding, I love HR, you go of and print up some more inspirational posters.
Re:As a hiring manager, I really hate HR! (Score:4, Funny)
Meanwhile, I am so good at my job because I'm a time-traveler from the 37th century...
Yeah, McDonalds can be like that...
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Meanwhile, I am so good at my job because I'm a time-traveler from the 37th century...
Improbable. Star Trek allows us to conclude that humans will start becoming logical, rational individuals within the next few hundred years. By the 37th century we will be accustomed to making sense at all times, and doing The Right Thing.
You just try getting anywhere with that attitude in today's corporate world!
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By the 37th century we will be accustomed to making sense at all times, and doing The Right Thing.
You just try getting anywhere with that attitude in today's corporate world!
Well I guess a job in politics is out of the question then.
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Yet power is never abused, there are no lazy people, and the brainwashing is completely effective and egalitarian. Also that no-named guy you summon to the transporter room for an away mission goes willingly and puts on a brave face, before he is horribly killed.
If you can take the most screwed up, historically improbable system of government and it works flawlessly, the only possible explanation is that people were universally rational about it!
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If you were going to beam propaganda back into the past to make sure you're fascist galactic federation came into being, you wouldn't show the bad bits now would you?
Most likely all the undesirables have been purged by TOS and almost certainly by TNG.
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I'm going to use that as my sig.
Re:As a hiring manager, I really hate HR! (Score:4, Informative)
I think that HR departments try to prove that they need to exist some times.
My sister works at a bank which has a HR department. When her baby was due and she had to take parental leave she was called to a meeting with HR. Her manager had previously asked her to work longer and take shorter leave. Scared that they'd find some reason to fire her she offered to work longer and drop in every now and then after the baby was born to take some of the workload of her co-workers. HR did not accept this proposal and insisted that she would take her paid leave and come back to work when she'd be ready.
Moral of the story; HRs' sole purpose is not hiring but keeping good staff members happy and in the company and more importantly protect the staff from management abuse.
Re:As a hiring manager, I really hate HR! (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason your sisters HR department went to the trouble of making sure she took her leave, is because if she had been cheated out of even one day of it, the company would have been in violation of federal law, and liable for a nice fat payday.
9 out 10 HR departments don't give a care about the actual employee, they care about liability and employment laws. Ultimately, their goal is not in line with the greater goals of the company, which is why you need HR departments, to protect companies from themselves.
I really, really hate HR (Score:5, Insightful)
Our HR department is the opposite. We were recently given a list of questions we must ask everyone whenthey return from sick leave.
Imagine how stupid I felt asking someone who returned after having a broken leg in a car accident which was the other driver's fault: "Do you think that this is likely to recur?", and with his leg in plaster "Have you any written evidence, such a s a medical certificate, showing that this was a genuine illness?".
More to the point with the possibility of a flu pandemic people have to make every reasonable effort to come into work, and must declare that they did so on returning
.
There is an escalation process for repeat absences, whatever the reason and a bonus for not being sick in a year, so I am sure some people will think "hey this could be swine flu but if I don't try to get in I could end up in disciplinary. On the bright side if it is swine flu maybe someone in HR will catch it".
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Yup. HR is afraid of being replaced by technology, so they make a wide-sweeping mindless policy to address some hypothetical problem that will likely never come up. I have worked at some companies with great HR departments (they don't have too much power) but at a couple where HR is run by mindless drones that have way more authority than they should. They make themselves look useful by inventing stupid policies that do nothing but make the company less competitive and a more miserable place to work.
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Not trying to be a jerk here; just commenting on what I see.
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Without knowing what company you work for, even spelling out using capital letters, hearing that you are a Chief Technology Officer just isn't that impressive. Every startup and small business that comes along dishes out fancy titles to employees. It's often a way to make people feel good about not getting a decent raise. Unless you work for a Fortune 500 tech company, it's just not that meaningful. At the last company I worked for, the CTO reported to a VP, who reported to a President, who reported to the
Just because they say they don't (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't mean they won't. I know a couple managers, and frankly you are sticking your neck out if you make a couple of bad hires. What is to stop someone from snooping on your myspace/facebook (other than privacy settings) from their own home.
It all comes down to what has been said before, if you don't want the world to know, don't put it on the internet. Its the reason why I discontinued facebook, because quite frankly, I find it rather advantageous to be mysterious ( especially with women ;) ).
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While it certainly might be a good idea to see whether a prospective employee is a two-time felon, for example, I do not know of anyone outside HR departments -- not a single person -- who really thinks it is your job to track down and report on whoever said "fuck" on the internet, or told the occasional off-color joke, or has a different political opinion.
When my
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HR people working at home? It's a pretty rare event to see them working in a workplace unless a boss has been standing behind them for more than a minute.
Taking away an excuse for them to spend their entire day on Facebook is a good thing and IMHO it was a pretty stupid way to exclude potential employees anyway. Just as well stories like this give me an excuse to spend my entire day on slashdot
Google your future employees (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone who has ever hired someone has googled him/her. It's almost inevitable not to land on a person's social networking page, if this person uses her own name online. It will be very hard to totally ignore the information you found there. Even if you don't intend to you will unconciously or conciously use it during the job interview.
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Ya know what.. bullshit.
Google for someone you know is on Facebook.. using the name they use on Facebook. Watch as the results don't come back with their Facebook page.
Experimenting instead of just assuming, welcome to science.
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I don't understand anything of what you are trying to say here, and how it relates to my post.
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Well, to be honest, I had to cleanup this sentence:
It's almost inevitable not to land on a person's social networking page, if this person uses her own name online.
I assumed you meant that it was inevitable that googling someone's name would land on their social networking page. Which is actually the opposite of what you said, but it doesn't make any sense for you to have been saying that :)
But yes, pick 10 random people on Facebook and google their names.. you will discover that maybe 10% of them result in hits to Facebook. Google simply doesn't rate Facebook very high in search results.
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You are totally right. Sorry about the mistake.
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Are you kidding? Pretty much anybody I google these days has their facebook page as the first hit, if they have one. Now granted, most of those people don't have a Nobel Prize to their name, won an Olympic medal in a decathlon, shot up a school or got their name into the intarwebs in a similar manner.
But for Janet Sixpack and Vassily Wessel, facebook and linkedin are top of the page hits.
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Google my first, middle and last name, you will find a guy who is not me, has my name, the same type of degree (better school though!), engaged to a woman with a name very similar to my wife's.
I'm not sure I would trust this Google hypothesis.
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Why is it bad to google people? Privacy arguments do not apply here. If people want privacy they shouldn't put their info on the 'net.
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Often times the information is taken outside of the domain it was intended for.
A classic example of that is Usenet. It was clearly intended for users generally using newsreaders, with posts expiring after a time period depending on the specific server retention period. It was obviously never supposed to have posts archived 10, 15, or 20 years later (first DejaNews archiving posts, then Google Groups backfilling the archive from other users' private archive sources). Based on that, Googling someone and then
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CVs are also 'some ASCII and some picture.' But seriously, I never found pictures of my employees in 'uncomfortable circumstances' on the 'net. I guess it also depends on the environment you work in and the people who are drawn to that environment, if you know what I mean.
Not surprising (Score:2)
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Though personally, I think that is selfish and self-righteous bullshit.
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Long ago, I quit a company because I found out that they were (really and provably) stealing money from me. They were very lucky I did not turn them over to the State and the Feds, because I had all the evidence I needed. (They were playing with both benefits and 401k, which meant they were committing State and Federal offenses.)
When I had trouble finding another job, I naturally
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We're getting to the point where you won't even be able to give a reference because of how it might be interpreted.
This is already the case. Most corporate HR departments will only confirm someone worked there.
innovation is always at the edge of acceptability (Score:2)
Most innovations typically play along the periphery of what is permitted because the norm is, by definition, in the middle. By its very nature, social networking runs contrary to U.S. constitutional rights to privacy [blogspot.com]. That doesn't stop facebook's popularity but I guess that it could cause any large corporation's legal department to blow a gasket. As a participant in an enterprise offering in social networking [dynamicalsoftware.com], I've run in to the opposite end of this spectrum. Companies don't want to reveal their internal p
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My point was that anybody can look at a billboard. You could paint something on a billboard and consider it somewhat private, but the reality is that it isn't private... it is publicly visible. Your "looking at it" as private is nothing but a delusion on your part... a belief or feeling that runs contrary to reality.
On many social networking sites, you can
Legal Issues both ways (Score:3, Interesting)
That's why you make your facebook... (Score:5, Funny)
...the most ridiculously amazing profile ever:
Hobbies and Interests:
- working hard every day
- always obeying superiors
- working overtime for standard pay
Favorite Movies:
Favorite Books:
Favorite Music:
- none I'm always working
- - -
Things NOT to include:
Hobbies and Interests:
- feeding my cocaine addiction
- leather and bondage fetish
- reading slashdot
- - -
My Facebook profile makes me look extremely plain. It is the bare essentials. A personal email contact, my high school and undergraduate information, and a list of some very safe hobbies like 'sports' or 'cooking'. It took me forever to untag all those pictures of me naked on acid.
Re:That's why you make your facebook... (Score:5, Funny)
Hobbies and Interests:
- feeding my cocaine addiction - leather and bondage fetish - reading slashdot
Congratulations, you have the job, can you wear this collar and gimp mask and head on down to the broom closet, ummm, computer room. I will be down to join you momentarily.
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First, no you aren't. Even in states that protect sexual orientation -- and not all states do -- being into S&M or B&D is not a protected class.
So take some persnal responsibility... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, LinkedIn is a different matter. I leave that public, as I use that for work networking.
Honestly, this reminds me of the days when we were starting to realize we couldn't actually just throw our email addresses out there willy-nilly.
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What is this personal responsibility thing you speak of? I was told I should demand the government solve all problems for me.
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This still won't protect you from
1) An unfortunate homonymical situation where someone with your name makes you look bad
2) Random assholes who use forged profiles to libel you and deny you a job
Violation of privacy or not, I would consider online information to be of dubious value at any rate.
Bein DA BOSS may mean your employee is helpless to stop you from googling him, however, no amount of authority will be able to authenticate your results.
However, your prospective boss probably won't care, and is like
Change your settings (Score:5, Informative)
On facebook you can limit your information to only be accessible to friends, friends of friends or your network. It's quite granular, if your information is accessible by people you don't want it to be then that's your fault for not using the privacy settings that facebook provides.
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That doesn't contradict what the parent post said.
S/N ratio==too much junk... (Score:2)
I set up several different 'profiles' on-line linked by e-mail addresses on different sites. Depending on the job applied for, that e-mail address and subsequent 'profile' is what I use.
Search for my slashdot UID anywhere, and all you find are this specific user ID's slashdot posts.
It does not connect to 'me' directly, easily, or obviously. I'm sure it could be done given enough motivation, but realistically, 'why bother' for someone like me?
who uses those services anyway? (Score:2)
I certainly do not have an account on any of the social networking sites. If I want to network socially, I'll go outside.
Though I'm glad a company is showing some common sense where privacy is regarded. If your new hire likes to listen to fall out boy and talk about her belly button piercing, that's none of her employers business.
Does this include Google? (Score:2, Interesting)
HR paranoia (Score:2)
No, it demonstrates typical HR paranoid fear of lawyers and a complete lack of understanding that there is more to a potential employee that a school diploma. I would consider it irresponsible not to google a potential candidate. You have to research your spending decisions, and hiring someone is a big ticket item.
Nonsense (Score:2)
Bullshit. If it's publicly posted, it's not private.
Bullshit. If it's public, it's not snooping. (Or anywhere near discriminatory.)
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If the topic under discussion was race and gender rather than the contents of social media, you'd have a point.
Reference Checks (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes social network sites are the most honest form of references you can find on an prospective candidate. And while some people express preferences or display aspects of their lives that put them in a protected class, one we're legal bound not to ask about, it is information that they choose to display in association with the name they use to seek employment. Personally, I try to ignore that stuff while I look for aspects of their life that may relate to their capability as an employee. If you are concerned that you might be denied employment because you <whatever>, use an alias.
On the flip side, some candidates reveal things that make it very easy to weed them from the process for reasons that, legal or not, are in the best interest of the company and staff. The most recent in our case was a candidate that wrote us a particularly angry letter about our interview process. A quick google revealed him to be a stalker who kept a record of threats he made and threats he received through chronicle of his life. We also found a separate site devoted to his lawsuit against a former employer over some other stalking/harassment type issue. Rather than apologize and try to correct our process, we bid him farewell.
Should we avoid learning all we can that is relevant to the job about someone we might consider hiring? Google provides levels of information previously only available through the use of a private eye and with the good comes the bad and unnecessary. So we have to ignore religion, age, race, gender, preferences, et cetera. But hiring managers have been doing that for years, this information often comes up or can be inferred during an interview.
This policy seems like a Luddite decision. It would probably be better for HR to do the research and then filter out the protected information so the hiring manager doesn't get tainted. Then the hiring can be done irrespective of protected class status and yet with full awareness of the relevant data.
Universities also.. (Score:2, Interesting)
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Boss: What is your religion?
Guy: Well, I'm Catholic
Boss: Well, we only hire Protestants here, so you don't get the job.
In the case the guy was perfectly fine telling others what his religion was unless it would be used to ju
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He can rant and rave all he likes about how it must be because he's Mormon, or gay, or likes dogs when the HR p