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Social Networking Sites Getting Risky For Recruiting
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
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).
It's referred to as dissociative identity disorder these days.
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