Microsoft: 70% of HR managers turn down job candidate based on online reputation

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/adjunctprofs/2010/03/online-reputation-can-cost-someone-a-job.html

by cwan • 16 years ago

20 22 16 years ago

lawprofessors.typepad.com

abennett• 16 years ago

HR folks are known for wanting only the blandest of employees and probably will look for any reason to disqualify a candidate whose "lifestyle" is cause for concern. Still, it's a shockingly high number and makes me wonder what else might fall under that "lifestyle" category.

pw0ncakes2• 16 years ago

It probably has to do with the fact that HR decisions don't have much of an upside. If you make a good hire, it reflects well on him. If you make a bad hire, people question your judgment.

You have an upside in hiring if you'll directly work with the people you hire. If you're in an entirely different department, there's no real benefit. HR is just the gatekeeper.

spudlyo• 16 years ago

Another reason I'm glad that my professional persona and my Internet persona are completely separate.

pmiller2• 16 years ago

In my case, I'm glad both my first and last names are incredibly common, to the point where I'm almost un-Google-able unless you already know quite a bit about me.

m_eiman• 16 years ago

Blogspam; article closer to the source: http://blogs.technet.com/privacyimperative/archive/2010/01/2...

Actual researchy stuff: http://www.microsoft.com/privacy/dpd/research.aspx (PDF and PPT)

pw0ncakes2• 16 years ago

What's utterly creepy about this is that employers aren't required to divulge that they made their decision based on unreliable online material. They should be. If a company wants to reject Jason M. Smith because someone posted on 4Chan that Jason W. Smith is an asshole, then fine, but they should be required to admit to their rationale with a straight face.

tjic2• 16 years ago

Since when does anyone owe you information about how they make their decisions? If I dump a girl after four dates, I may tell her exactly why ... or I may say "I just didn't feel that spark". It's nicer, and easier, than saying "the more you talked, the more I realized that you've got a grating accent, I don't think much of your family, and your behaviors aren't in line with your stated life goals".

Giving a full length run down of my decision making process just opens the door for a conversation that I don't want to have, and isn't going to make anyone happy.

Now, if I can reject someone as a candidate for the position of my wife after four dates without a long discussion, then why can't I reject someone for the position of engineer after zero ?

timwiseman• 16 years ago

I see where you are coming from, but there are a couple of things I think you should consider.

First, that "unreliable online material" is likely a social networking site and can be tied to the person in question with a high degree of reliability. This is certainly not perfect, mistaken identity is always possible, as is impersonation, but on social networking sites you can normally say it is more likely than not the right person. I am not saying that it is right to make judgements on someone's employability based on those sites, just that you can often be pretty confident you are talking about the right person.

Next, the rational for rejecting an applicant is very frequently "We found a better candidate." Now, the reason they judged that other candidate to be better might be because they found something they didn't like about applicant A on the internet, but that is still often going to be the rationale.

zackattack• 16 years ago

I can't wait til legislation gets passed and the law catches up. It seems like a great way to weasel through anti discrimination laws.

tjic2• 16 years ago

Speaking as the owner of a small company, I think that the government has absolutely no basis for telling me that I'm not allowed to make one of the most important decisions for my company based on all the data I can get.

If a quick google of a candidate showed a blog post where he's railing about his current job "fuck this employer, I'm going to trash the database on my last day and put a lot of bugs in the source code", then I WANT TO KNOW THAT.

A law that says that I can't know that is BS, and I'll find a way to comply with the letter of the law while still getting the information I need.

DannoHung• 16 years ago

Yeah, but that just gets you the smart disgruntled employee who trashes the database and doesn't say anything about it.

At least with the idiot, you can keep an eye on him.

raganwald• 16 years ago

Speaking as the citizen of a country with a constitution, I have no comment about candidates who rail on their current job but I would be disturbed if employers started disqualifying employees based on critieria prohibited by law in my jurisdiction (Ontario).

For example, what if an HR employee can see from their public facebook page that they appear to be a fan of LGBT organizations and are interested in same sex people?

This exposes the HR person to information that is illegal to gather in an interview and illegal to use as the basis for job discrimination. You can also use marital status or interest in having kids if you prefer... Doing background checks that are not strictly work related is a huge issue. Your example is work related, so I empathize with your desire to know about it. But looking into non-employment behaviour opens up a huge can of worms... For employees and employers.

jseifer• 16 years ago

While your example is pretty extreme I definitely agree with you. At least in the US, posting pictures and ranting online isn't a protected class when hiring/firing for a job. If I were an candidate/employee in one of these cases I would want to know if something I posted, or was posted about me, was influential in a decision but probably shouldn't be required disclosure. One would hope that the decision maker would be forthcoming enough to admit it in such cases.

holdenc2• 16 years ago

If an HR manager can deny you the job, it's not worth having.

HeyLaughingBoy• 16 years ago

Please expand on why you feel this way. That sentence is essentially meaningless.

OK, I disagree: our HR people are excellent first line filters and save us wasting our time. If a candidate doesn't make it through HR it's because they either lied on their resume/cover letter, give off really bad vibes (we've found that every time the HR person ignores this, we turn the candidate down for the same reason), or is fundamentally unsuited to working on a team.

I'd much rather have HR not schedule a tech interview if there's already a good reason to pass. And, yes, non-technical reasons are excellent reasons to pass on an otherwise good candidate. Do you really want to work with a smart person who drains everyone's morale?

holdenc2• 16 years ago

Reasons why "if an HR manager can deny you the job, it's not worth having":

HR managers are corporate bureaucracy, and if they are making critical hiring decisions you can assume the company is bureaucratic.

HR managers go by charm factor, like it or not. When you only need the very brightest, the charm factor is less important.

HR managers like to believe they maintain a corporate status quo, which is a dangerous thing. And most often this means instituting policies of blandness and conformity, even via hiring selections.

nostrademons• 16 years ago

And how many people are hired based on online reputation?

My last two paid jobs I got through someone I met online, and in my last employment process, it sounded like blog & homepage were a pretty big factor in the decision to hire me.

jcl• 16 years ago

FWIW, from the original article (see m_eiman's link):

Reputation can also have a positive effect as in the United States, 86% of HR professionals (and at least two thirds of those in the U.K. and Germany) stated that a positive online reputation influences the candidate’s application to some extent; almost half stated that it does so to a great extent.

JimBastard• 16 years ago

I think most people are missing the point here.

Sure some people will get rejected for having inappropriate content associated with their name, but the lack of having a good online persona is way worse then having a bad one.

What do I mean? Do you have a professional blog? Are you an active commenter on any professional mailing lists or forums? Do you help run or maintain any open-source projects? Does googling your name reveal a comprehensive history of your career?

I know personally that I get most job offers directly from my github account and linked in account.

rajat2• 16 years ago

Online reputation can certainly get you a job; why should it not lose you one?

If you participate in an open source project, you are likely to get a boost in an interview with a knowledgeable company. It certainly does with me when I've hired someone. Now, if someone at the company goes and looks at your code in that open source project, and says "Yikes! That's some pretty awful code!", then you've got a problem.

People have been getting jobs and losing opportunities due to reputation forever. This is just an extension to existing processes; nothing really new.

Microsoft: 70% of HR managers turn down job candidate based on online reputation

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