That’s brilliant!
One can never tell where sarcasm ends and parodies begin. I have no idea which this one falls under. Sarcasm? Whoosh?
I’ve hired people like that, including as engineer who applied for office manager because she wanted to go home at 5:01 everyday to her kids. I actually stopped the interview and we discussed life choices. I walked away thoroughly convinced that it was because she didn’t particularly like being an engineer, there wasn’t a career ladder for her at Pioneer(!) and that she would be the best damn office manager I could ever hope for. She was.
She worked for me for a couple of years and then moved away.
In your scenario, were I hiring a MA, I would have absolutely no problem with someone who found out she sucked at being a nurse, but I’d really want to know that she’s going to do well as a MA.
Yip. Sounding professional is part of the job. When it’s my customers who are calling, you need to sound good.
A :dubious: in a recent search was an applicant who didn’t include an email address. The job was web-based professional development instruction.
LOL! For once I’m the pretty one!
You could be blowing off a perfect employee who has bad credit because, I don’t know, maybe they don’t have a job? It’s a feedback loop. They can’t get a job because they can’t pay their bills and they can’t pay their bills because they can’t get a job because they can’t pay their bills.
An employment-dependent credit check in 2014 with such high levels of unemployment is simply vicious. You’ve already got the job so it’s fine with you, but to the guy who desperately needs the work and is otherwise qualified it’s absolutely devastating. I understand that in certain fields it makes sense, but for entry-level jobs or careers not directly involved in handling money? Ridiculous.
To piggyback on Airman’s post, here’s an excellent 40-minute documentary that explains why credit worthiness doesn’t reflect how hard-working a person is or much of anything else.
We had a thread about the googling issue a few months ago (Skald started it, I think).
One issue to consider is that googling before offering an interview is that you may be opening yourself to racial/sexual discrimination complaints.
If you don’t google until after you’ve extended interview invites, it reduces that risk.
I think a lot of people trust they aren’t going to act in a racially/sexually/religiously/age discriminatory way. But I’m of the opinion that no one is immune from being biased, so one should limit temptation as much as possible.
And let’s say someone finds something that raises a red flag. Like a news article citing the person with the applicant’s name as a defendant in a criminal court case. Not only does the employer risk confusing the wrong person with the job applicant, but they may also rush to judge an innocent person as guilty.
There is such a thing as too much information, IMHO.
They check your credit when you enlist in the military, and having bad credit won’t keep you out, but it may keep you from getting a high security clearance, in the theory that you can be bribed if you have a lot of debt, especially bad debt, and not getting a high security clearance can keep you from getting certain MOSs-- which is to say, what your specific job is. You can be kept out of intelligence or the military police, for example. You can always improve your security clearance later, though, and sometimes the military approves retraining for a second MOS, so if you are joining the military BECAUSE you have debt, and haven’t been able to find a good civilian job, you still have a shot at some of the higher clearance jobs, you just may have to re-enlist.
I have no idea whether there is any research behind the idea that people with debt are more bribable. It may all be theory.
Wouldn’t this work the opposite way, too?—ie. it is in your benefit as an interviewer to google first, and ensure that you include some minority candidates.
In this specific case, the OP has said she has received 50 resumes and wants to interview only about 5 people. Picked at random, it’s quite possible that all 5 will be white. Wouldn’t googling them first be a logical-and fully legitimate-way to protect herself from racial complaints?
I think the idea is that you might be accused of Googling specifically to weed out Blacks, or Jews, or to find out whether “Jody Smith” is a woman. If you have already interviewed the person, actually met them, and asked them lots of job-specific questions, you’ll have a better defense if you are accused of eliminating them based on race or gender.
“I Googled her, and decided I didn’t want to waste time interviewing an anti-vaxxer,” is reasonable to us, but if she is unlucky enough to get an anti-vax judge who doesn’t see the contradiction in an anti-vax person working in a medical office, because the judge goes to the doctor for his gout medicine, she might lose an anti-discrimination case. The judge might believe the anti-vax argument is just an excuse not to hire a black person, or a Jew. However, if the person has been interviewed, and somehow the person having reservations about specifically reminding people about flu shots, because it should be a choice, or something, came up, and that caused Psychobunny to Google and find the anti-vax screed, Psychobunny may not even have to admit to Googling, just say to the judge that reminding people about flu shots is part of the job, period, not negotiable, and that’s why the person wasn’t hired, and not that Psychobunny is worried that the person my pass anti-vax literature to patients under the counter.
At least, I think that’s the theory. It’s got to do with how much the non-protected reason (anti-vax) can be judged as jumping to a conclusion (someone could have changed their mind since writing the blog post, or claim they know to keep personal opinions out of the workplace), and if it seems to be far-fetched, then it may be seen as a cover for rejecting someone because they are a member of a protected class.
ETA: Not saying I support this approach-- just trying to follow the logic behind it. I can see how someone could get jammed up, but I also see how someone faced with weeding through 50 resumes can find Google useful, and you won’t always discover someone’s “protected class” status from Googling.
Unfortunately, most evidence indicates that knowledge of a black applicant’s race tends to work against them:
http://jezebel.com/5822293/man-takes-fake-white-name-to-test-job-discrimination
I really can’t see how that would protect her from anything, given that implicit bias can affect how applicants are viewed as long their race is known. An employer may claim that her short list was drawn from respondants that met all of her fair criteria. But if in truth those criteria were chosen after she’d already confirmed the applicant’s race (or religious affiliation or age or whatever), another evaluator could come up with a different “short list”.
As I said earlier, it wouldn’t be too hard to find out if a prospective employer has run a google search on you and seen what you look like. Not when Google Analytics can tell you who visited your website, what search terms they used, what links they clicked on, and how long they lingered. I don’t know if suits have been brought over this kind of thing, but it certainly seems possible to me.
Don’t MAs have to be separately trained and certified for that? I don’t think an RN could decide that s/he doesn’t want that much responsibility, etc. and step down to become an MA.
It’s like a doctor can’t become a nurse without specialized training, either.
But she’s not picking them at random now. As the OP makes clear, she has a well-defined set of criteria, all of them related to the nature of the job, which she is using to winnow out the resumes. Importantly, she is only using the information that the candidates themselves have provided.
If, using those criteria, she only extends interviews to a group of people all of the same race, at least she can say that she did not know their race when she offered the interviews, based on the criteria she’s identified as being relevant to the job.
Once you start googling, that changes. If the google reveals that a candidate is of a particular race, and she doesn’t offer that person an interview, how does she prove that it was the objective criteria that excluded that person, and not that person’s race?
In fact, if she’s going beyond the criteria in the OP and googling, that suggests she’s looking for something more than just those criteria; what is that “something more”? maybe it’s just any other indications about the individual’s background; but maybe it’s also race. And then it’s on her to show that it was “something more” that wasn’t race.
And, if she includes some minority candidates just for the sake of minority candidates, to protect herself, is she discriminating against a candidate who’s not of the minority and doesn’t get an interview, because the last interview slot was given to a visible minority just for the sake of not discriminating against minority candidates? what criteria is she using for her personal affirmative action program?
Immaterial, she’s going to eventually meet them. The problem isn’t googling, it’s racism. Actually, if she’s going to be racist, she’s better off googling rather than after the interview.
Sucks, but true.
As an employer, I don’t Google prospective employee, or current employees. I don’t have time, and I really don’t care. I do run background checks before hiring, but never after that.
HYPOTHETICAL
I’m a remodeler, so my employees are in your house.
I hire Dave. Dave passes background check with flying colors.
A year later, I get a call from a homeowner, hysterical, that Dave has been taking peeping Tom shots of her, and she’s going to sue me to kingdom come. It turnsout he has, indeed, been taking pictures of her.
A quick Google search on his name leads me to find out that Dave has been doing this for at least five years, and other homeowners might possibly be victims. He has never been arrested or charged.
All the posters here that are saying it’s a gross violation of privacy to Google employees, what say you? Would you not hold the employer responsible? Especially if it was a two minute search? Especially if it was you or your daughter?
Somehow, I believe you’d be screaming for blood at my gross negligence for not knowing, not doing a quick search.
I just can’t win.
One thought I had was that someone could come up with some sort of “personal responsibility” score that could distinguish “responsible” people who have bad credit due primarily to things outside of their control such as layoffs from “irresponsible” people who have bad credit because they are too lazy to keep track of their bills, intentionally overspend, misbehave on the job enough to get fired, won’t go back to school, don’t spend enough time searching for jobs, etc.
While the idea makes moral sense, it would be a nightmare to manage. E.g. if someone spends 30 hours a week searching for jobs, is that enough to be considered “responsible”, or are you going to give them a bad score unless they get it up to 40 hours a week? For some fields, that might make sense. In others where there are only a few companies hiring in the area, it doesn’t make sense to make people “put in hours” that are expected to have only a trivial effect.
Worse, the background check guy has gone into the remodeling business and undercut your prices. Hey, if you can do his job better than him without any particular training (Who needs picky details like "ya know, there’s probably more than one guy out there named “Dave”?), why wouldn’t it work the other way around?
From the other side of the coin, once you do hire someone, please take down the ad. There’s nothing more frustrating than sending off a resume for job that you are made for and getting back a “sorry we filled the position but will keep your resume on file” response.
What about googling someone after the interview? Would that run into the same issues as googling pre-selection?