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"Pre-Crime" Comes To the HR Dept.
storagedude writes "Like something out of the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, a startup called Social Intelligence is mining social media to weed out job applicants based on their potential for violence, drug abuse or just plain bad judgment. The startup also combs sites like Facebook and Twitter to monitor current employees, presumably to monitor compliance with company social media policy, but as the criteria are company-defined, anything's possible. Just one more reason to watch what you post, folks."
I take it this screening company dont mind a few lawsuits for deformation and libel ?
It's better than the "IQ" test if it predicts behavior.
It's better than the "drug" testing because not every drug user is a drug addict.
It's highly focused on what actually matters.
If you are rational you won't go online saying and doing stupid things in a way in which it's linked to your workplace persona. If you are irrational and completely lack self control then you might, but then you might be like that Barksdale Google engineer and I'd rather people like that guy be filtered out than to continue with hiring irrational but brilliant.
That being said nobody is rational 100% of the time, but those people who are at work using their work computer to search for pornography -1, those people who are spouting idiocy under their real name -1, those people who don't protect their name, their reputation, as they would protect their company -1.
Create a persona that is unbelievably wonderful. Give that persons a handle and its own email account. Then if you are asked if you go online give them that persona's handle and email address. Your live in uncle must own all those other handles and he uses your PC a lot. But you are the one who constantly emails about rescuing orphans and stray dogs and cats and attends all patriotic functions ad nauseum.
If a company is so restrictive and intrusive that they can't take a couple crazy, sleep-deprived 3 am posts maybe they're not the best place to work?
From the company's point of view, any information they can gather on a potential employee is helpful. I just hope who ever uses that type of service is wise enough to not take it too, too seriously.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
In a bad economy, sticking it to the individual worker through HR seems to always creep up.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
So now stalking is officially a profession. "Don't call us stalkers! We believe in the well being of our clients so we want to stop crime before it happens. We are doing a noble deed here."
Most people simply share pretty much everything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Guess what? You are advertising yourself.
You agreed to it when you signed up.
You agreed to it when you decided posting your life on line was a good idea.
Not only to future employers but to the marketers who are sold your data from Facebook, Twitter, et al.
You already sold your right to privacy by:
a) agreeing to the terms of service.
b) thinking there are no consequences for permanent and historical archiving your stupidity.
Companies already have the option to fire you for most any reason they see fit. You've just now made it easier.
The big danger of judging people by their character as a fit to a culture is that a particular character type becomes over-represented, and all decision-making could basically be made interchangeably by any member of the organization. Just as a gene pool that has little diversity is much more vulnerable to disaster, so to is the organization that believes that it will be more effective by stereotyping people according to their determination of their character.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
They do, however there are limitations on what they can do. They can require a drug screening and back ground check, references, but something like this is questionable at best.
Basically sounds to me like their trying to find a legal way of going back to pre-affirmative action times and hire people based upon things other than fit and qualification. Perhaps I'm a bit cynical, but this looks like a convenient way to not hire minorities.
Just one more reason to watch what you post, folks
Or one more reason to make ethical career choices, such as not working for a company that doesn't respect your right to a private life.
The hardest thing about being in HR is justifying your existence. The HR department where I work spits out a constant stream of useless projects, purely so they can claim to be doing something. For example we have a program to encourage employees to find people to apply for jobs at our company, but there are no positions open to apply for. The list goes on.
Snake oil products like this are ideal for HR. They take maybe a fifth of an HR person to administer, so it looks great on the HR managers resume (always looking for that next job, go home and update your resume). They use money (administered a budget of $DOLLARS, also great on the resume). They sound like a good idea. Its sounds really web 2.0 and hip to be involved. Really, it can't fail.
It just won't work.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
... what the Facebook/Twitter/media-stuff profiles of the people involved in that company look like.
What was the expression? "Eat your own dog food",was it?
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
If these people can't get a job, what motivation do they have to change? If you've got nothing to lose and no prospects of anything better, why not commit crimes? Do we really want violence prone drug addicts wandering the streets with nothing to do?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The thing is, more people get caught in the crossfire for no reason. For example your boss might object to your political stance, or he might not like you being a atheist, or he might think you're a drunk when there's only one picture of you at your birthday. Maybe he sees you dressed as a woman at a halloween party and fires you because he's homophobic. If your name is John Smith, good luck cleaning up your online identity.
Sure, some of those things are technically illegal reasons for firing, but really, in the US it isn't that hard to fire you for any reason (sometimes even no reason). Until the position descriptions have "24hr company representative and diplomat" in them (with appropriate pay), what you do on your own time and dime is your business. This just smacks of companies trying to squeeze people by the balls even harder.
And best of all, you can find out things through Facebook that you are prohibited by law from asking your employees. Want to discriminate against employees on the basis of religious or political beliefs? Gotcha covered!
It's highly focused on what actually matters.
What actually matters is job performance, period.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
sorry there are a small number of jobs that require any background checks and a much smaller number of ones that require serious background checks - sounds like a lot of HR dept's in the states have a vastly overinflated sense of their importance.
sucks if your dyslexic though
Shouldn't we be giving credit to Phillip K. Dick for authoring this story idea instead of Spielberg who, undoubtedly, has enough credits to his name and merely directed this film?
FUCK. THAT. SHIT.
That is all.
(Goddamn filters for caps.)
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Yeah. It would be just like life before 1995.
Not every drug user is an addict, but every drug user is willing to violate federal law of their own free will.
Employers are less concerned about junkies applying for jobs, and more concerned about people who selectively adhere to the law as they see fit. Can that same person be expected to follow the rules while working for you? Would they thumb their nose at privacy laws or other policies that would harm your business? Will they use drugs on the work site and cause injury that you could be liable for?
For an employer, checking for drug use is just common sense.
they specifically mention the fact that if you're tagged in an image your boss is contacted
What a great way to get rid of workplace rivals! This will enable a whole new level of viciousness in company politics!
Seriously, it would take very little work and very little risk to completely ruin someone's career.
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
> Employers are less concerned about junkies applying for jobs, and more concerned about people who selectively adhere to the law as they see fit.
Sounds like just about any senior executive.
Some of them will not only selectively adhere to the law but will continue to violate the law when caught and fined by the feds because it is cheaper to just pay the fine.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Your phrase people who selectively adhere to the law as they see fit sounds to me like a euphemism for "people who think". I know that's not how you intend it, and I'm not sure if the opinions in your post are yours, or your view of how employers operate, but it bears noting that laws are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes capricious, sometimes arbitrary. Frankly, I wouldn't *want* to hire someone who blindly follows all laws, without regard to how sensible they are -- not least because such a person would very likely be bad company. I'd much prefer hiring someone who thinks.
Granted, that can be difficult to ascertain from an online profile. But online evidence of lawbreaking wouldn't automatically rule someone out for me -- depending on the law(s) in question. Being discriminating is not in and of itself a bad thing; it's all in how one goes about it.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Large enough companies can get away with it for general enough positions. Sometimes they're only sort of doing it anyway. Many have a policy that you have to tender and "consider" outside applicants for a position you crafted entirely as a promotion for someone within the company.
I'm not defending the practice, I'm just pointing out that it's not irrational.
I'm in the Libertarian Party and one of my County Libertarian Party Officers had an issue with work checking his Facebook. He is a "fan" of several pages that are pro-decriminalisation of drugs. His co-workers then assumed he was a user of drugs. It took some a large amount of clarification for them to realise that a person could be pro-freedom and yet not desiring to exercise those freedoms in certain areas. I could really see this service misidentify individuals under similar circumstances.
After clearing this up he took my advise of removing all work friends from his account and making his profile more private.
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1. And you're answering that to a post which actually said it'll be used to do some covert racial or religious or political discrimination.
It already happens too. If you think someone surely can't just happen to find more flaws online for blacks or foreigners than for blacks without getting sued... guess what? It already happens. In a study, for the same resume they found out you had about 50% more chances to get called for a job interview with a name like John than a name like Ulambongo, and nobody gets sued for those uncannily non-uniform results. Welcome to the new world of online checking, where you don't even have to guess by name, and can just look on Facebook for whether that guy is a black or muslim or whatever you don't like.
But at any rate, the relationship to your retarded rant is... what? Are you willing to claim that racial and religious and political profiling (which are the kind of things the GP predicted) are actually necessary to predict who'll shoot up the place? Or did you have your canned rant and just had to use it whether it fits or not?
2. And your argument is... wait, what? The tiny percentage of workplace deaths? According to CDC data, that's an average of 800 per year, with the maximum being about 1000 in 1994, and the minimum just over 500 in 2006.
That's 500 in 310,000,000 people or roughly 1.5 per _million_ people.
So you're going to justify discrimination against literally tens of millions of people to maybe prevent a tiny percentage of 500 deaths a year? Even as scaremongering attempts to justify why someone else needs to bend over for the good of the corporate or government overlords, this has to take the cake for failed sense of proportions.
Cretin. Seriously, what a cretin.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What you say about yourself and who you associate with is a pretty clear indicator of who you are, and I can't fault the company too much for being able to research things publicly posted.
How is this relevant to being a drug user? You assume they're derelicts hanging out in opium dens or something, when they're just the guy building the next ecommerce platform.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
There are other people who share my name. One of them is a big drinker.
If there were only pictures, one might see that it wasn't me, but how do potential employers know that the guy they read about isn't me and how do I tell them? Yeah, I can tell them up front, but that seems sort of like a Streisand effect waiting to happen. I mean, what if clients of theirs saw that? Even if they know it's not true, well... better to go with somebody "safe" ...
You really haven't been paying attention for the last forty years if you think that bad practices will be competed out of the market. I mean, really?
I only use FB for people I talk to and see frequently. I wouldn't add such a person as you described. If I haven't met you in person, or I don't remember you, you're not getting added. If we used to be friends and we don't talk anymore, you're not getting added; and if you already are I'll remove you after a year or so of no contact.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Or maybe post 95'ers may have to grow up and learn a harsh lesson - being an adult means there are consequences for your actions.
NOW GET OFF MY LAWN !!!
This is completely untrue, and I don't think I've even seen tinfoil hat types claiming that before now... Facebook offers targeting to groups of people based on criteria the advertiser enters, it never reveals who the users are that meet those criteria, nor who clicks the ads, etc.
That's my point, we don't live pre-'95 anymore and the richness of the online experience has become integral to our modern lives.
And if I don't have a rich online experience that can be publicly related to me (using pseudonyms and such), does it make me a freak, a suspect or both?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
And you get +1 funny instead of insightful. This is how reliable the "online experience" is. Good luck explaining to your boss why "someone on the Internet" called you a rapist.
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
Ok, so let's say I decide that it's in my interests to have no online presence (not that I have much of one now). I will delete and disown everything about me that is online. How long before having no online presence is seen as subversive behaviour? Nothing to hide nothing to fear right? Well if I'm not showing something then I must be hiding it...
c) anyone you know, and indeed anyone you don't know agreeing to a terms of service, then posting unverified claims that you did something that a random person might object to. This isn't just reading what individuals have written online about themselves.
Still, well done for posting as anonymous in your case. Because if I write "Joe Bloggs takes illegal drugs" then anyone called Joe Bloggs has that on his search results from now on. Just as well I didn't know your name to use instead.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
You just made that up. I dislike Facebook as much as the next paranoid geek, but I just don't believe you.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it