This is hardly theoretical.
Right now, a staffer for a Republican senator is getting fired. Her offense was sleeping with numerous men, in various interesting ways, accepting money for many of the sex acts, and posting all of this in her blog.
I don’t think any of us will cry many tears over her unemployment, because what she did was amazingly stupid.
http://www.wonkette.com/archives/the-lost-washingtonienne-wonkette-exclusive-etc-etc-004162.php
The obvious answer would seem to be to Google the name of the person who will be interviewing you. If they ask you any questions about your Internet-posted information, feel free to return the favor. “Gee, if they hired you, considering that you cheated on your wife in Cancun, you have a diaper fetish, and you defrauded your insurance company on a non-existent MVA injury, how bad can my membership in the NRA really look? Oh, you say your bosses don’t know about your transgressions?”
This isn’t a factual answer, of course, but if the company isn’t willing to hold all its employees to the same Google standard, then such a policy is an open invitation to lawsuit, in my opinion. Except for certain public officials, it’s probably impractical to hold employees to any standard of behavior while those employees are off-duty. Otherwise, the only employable people would be Jesus Christ and my cat Tuffy (and she’s dead).
I just googled myself silly and got no valid hits about me. Same with my SSN.
I gues my question would be, “Why would an employer bother?”
For many of the more academic or technical professions, you’d expect to have quite a bit of visibility on the Internet in terms of publications, citations, contributions to technical newsgroups, conference announcements, and suchlike.
Obviously it should be OK to look for that material and evaluate it.
If a person puts the details of their personal life out on the Web, and those details are enough to give a potential employer pause – well, maybe they weren’t a good fit after all?
Applications for employment generally include a section allowing the prospective employer to use various methods to gather information, e.g. credit report, criminal background, previous employers. The internet is simply another means of doing this.
It is no less ethical than calling up a previous employer or co-workers and asking for their opinion. I am not sure that I would use this as a hiring manager, unless I was looking for something specific, like papers published. Overs have mentioned the various dangers of doing so, but it is also fairly time consuming. There are much better ways of finding relevant information about a person than a google search, especially if you are dealing with a person with a common name.
Sorry buddy, once you post something on the 'net, all bets are off. It becomes public information. Whenever I post something, send an email or an IM, I ASSUME “other” people are reading it. To post things you don’t want everybody to see on the internet is doing so at your own risk.
I have a not-that-common name but I share it with some who is apparently mildly famous. Nothin’ out there about me.
Maybe I haven’t stated the issues clearly. We all know that things posted on the Internet can be read by anyone. However, I am asking if it is ethical for an employer to do so, considering that they are legally bound to make an equal opportunity hiring decision and that they possibly could not do so if they read information about an applicants sexual preference, religion, or political affiliation. The employer could also not be sure that the person they are reading about is the person on the application unless that person specifically told them so.
OK.
Maybe my understanding of ethics is a bit cloudy, but I don’t believe knowledge will affect anything other than ignorance.
Let’s say I hate hobbyist matadors because one killed my favorite pet bull when I was a child. I’ve made it a point to make the lives of hobbyist matadors extremely difficult whenever I get the chance. I interview an acceptable candidate to fill a Literary Criticism course in a local college. To verify that he has in fact had a number of published articles and short works, as he pointed out in his resume, I do a lazy search on the internet for his name as he advised it was styled in his publications: “Aureleo Segundo Mendoza Buendia, VI.” Let us assume futher that we are in Eugene, Oregon and that this would be a reasonably unusual name here. In addition to the 5 or six hits for literature that I expected I also notice this same name is used by a renowned hobbyist matador in Eugene, Or. And there are pictures of the matador. And this is the same guy I just interviewed! I hate him! Gnaaaarrrrr…!
Now. I will only behave unethically if I allow this person’s hobby to interfere with the hiring process, or if, after I hire him, I treat him differently solely because of his hobby. As a human, I am allowed to hate or have opinions about whomever I want even if those opinions or whatever are completely erroneous (because let’s say my new hire was really a PETA agent merely *posing * as a hobbyist matador to end this barbaric practice).
Do this, don’t be jackass and use your real name/location in what you would call an “anonymous” posting.
That’s what I think too.
I don’t mind people finding my sites and seeing, (for instance) what my hobbies are (art, photography, Mac computers, blah blah blah). While I find none of my hobbies or interests controversial, it’s possible that there’s some whacked-out employer who has an irrational dislike for Mac-using artists or whatever. I don’t think that they should be able to ethically use my personal hobbies against me, if all my other qualifications are spot-on for the job.
However, if I’m applying for a job that requires good grammar and spelling and my web sites are all full of bad grammar and spelling (and the creation dates on the sites are very recent, so it isn’t as if I wrote them 10 years ago), then I think that is a relevant piece of information for the prospective employer to use.
Here is a hypothetical situation: You are the administrator for a research lab and you interview a person that fits the job criteria. On a whim, you google their name and discover that they are quite active in the animal rights community. There is no chance of mistaken identity because one of the sites has a picture. Now, you suspect that they are applying for the job under false pretenses; that they want to gather evidence of mistreatment or perhaps release the lab animals. Would it be ethical not to hire them based on that knowledge?
Excuse me, but isn’t arbitrary prejudice in hiring/firing/renting/etc. only illegal for those very few cases that have been singled out? As in, age, sex, religion, marital status, national origin, etc?
It seems to me that Inigo Montoya’s matador hating employer could perfectly well ask each candidate where they stood on bull fighting, or even put a question about it into the job application. And if Candidate Brown says he’s jolly keen on it, the employer could leap to his feet, scream “Out of my office, you taurine murderer!”, and no one could say boo.
Assuming this is so, I don’t see how it is at all unethical to discriminate against someone for whatever non-protected reason, regardless of how he got that information.
So Candidate Brown loses out in this case. His web site also displays the duck decoys he carves…and the next employer might very well come down in his favor because of a shared interest in hunting.
So what? When we hire someone we aren’t just looking for a specific set of skills. We also want someone who will ‘fit in’ with the company’s ethos and be a ‘good worker’ and reasonably pleasant to have around and a lot of other less defined reasons.
I don’t see anything wrong about that.
Two people have specifically said that yes it is legal and ethical why do you keep asking?
Yeah . . . now that I think of it, you’re right. As long as they don’t use information that is “forbidden” (religion, sexual orientation, family status, etc.) then it’s not unethical.
I do think that it can be used in a kind of creepy and intrusive way, though. If they want to know, they should ask. I like people to be straightforward, and if they don’t ask, I’ll figure that it’s not important enough to be relevant to the job. Or at least you’d think so. They obviously can’t ask the “illegal” questions, but if they refrain from asking you something that is really important to them and very relevant in how you’d “fit in” at the company, but instead sneak around and try to search out that information about you without you knowing about it, well, that seems somewhat sleazy.
For instance: (a melodramatic example) I’ve been trying to learn Spanish and so I’ve written a web page where I give some links to Spanish-language books and a little bit of information. Some zealous “English only” zealot might be offended by that, and even though (as far as I can tell) there would be nothing unethical or illegal in refusing me a job because of my web page encouraging more reading of Spanish (especially since I’m not a minority), I’d think it would be a crappy thing to do. (Unless I demonstrated some “zealot” attitude about Spanish myself, but in a mere educational fact-finding page, that seems unlikely.)
I think the more important question for the employer would be “Why does this candidate use such poor internet judgement as to link their actual name to a blog or LJ?” How else would they #1 find it and #2 know it was actually yours.
This strays from GQ, but IMHO the OP keeps asking because he or she hopes to eventually get the answer they want to hear.
flickster makes a good point, as well,
The factual question of legality has, I think, been answered, so I’ll close this thread.
Ethics in general is not a factual matter, but a matter for debate. You may if you wish open a debate in GD about the ethics of hiring practices. A factual question about the contents of a well-defined code of ethics (like the AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics) would be a GQ. Presumably people in charge of hiring at various companies are not bound by a single code of ethics.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
I’m not sure how useful it would be. I googled my name and evidently my wife(which I don’t have) suffered a brain injury in a car accident, and I write nasty letters to the Pnom Penh gazzete.