Unit 3, Article 11: How Deep Can You Probe?

Zeidner, R. (2007). How deep can you probe? May employers are going online to check out job candidtaes. But does the practice carry hidden risks?. In P. De Palma (Ed.), Annual editions: Computers in society (pp. 49-51). New York: Mc Graw Hill.

Summary:

This article was published for the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) 2007 annual conference. The author, Rita Zeidner, talks about a practice that has become more and more common for HR departments and recruiters: checking into a potential candidate online before offering them a job. According to the 2007 article, about 20% of employers have eliminated a potential candidate because of information that they found online.

For some employers, it doesn’t seem like a big deal to research potential candidates online through web searches and/or social networking sites, but for others this practice is a huge breech of privacy. Employers who intend to do a criminal background check on potential hires are required to notify the person first, so should it be required that an employer notify a person before looking into them online. Information found online can be untrue and misleading. According to the sites’ terms of use, using social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook for commercial purposes may also be illegal.

The author concludes her article by pointing out that there are many ways that technology can be used legally by HR professionals and employers. Currently, online background checks are becoming more assessable and reducing the amount of time a company has to wait to get back results. There is also software being developed that can help HR professionals to quickly and efficiently do a background check, email references, and tabulate the results.

Reaction:

Personally, I feel that whatever a person publishes about themselves online is there for others to use as they wish. If you hire a person to work for and represent your company, you want them to be representing themselves in a respectable way the rest of the time. People need to realize that what they post online and on social networking sites is public information. They are marketing themselves by the way they appear online.

However, I also think that employers are responsible for making sure that the content they find online was actually posted there by the applicant themselves. There are a lot of people online with the same names, and it is easy for someone to create a false profile on behalf of someone else. When it is applicable to the job, employers should have the right to check into an applicant’s online activities as long as they let the applicant know beforehand. Applicants should have the opportunity to explain which online content they posted themselves and what may not be theirs.