Re: Hiring Practices

["Huber, Mike" <mrhuber -at- SOFTWARE -dot- ROCKWELL -dot- COM>]

Besides the ethics, I could see searching the net as a kind of "asking."
Probably something you wish you hadn't done if you end up in court.

I would hate to have the opponent's lawyer spinning horror stories about
high-tech spying and how I used the company's technological big guns (OK,
Deja News and a desktop PC, but I'd hate to have to explain it to a jury
that's never used a browser) to spy on some poor job applicant.

-------------------------
Flame before reading!
Mike Huber mike -dot- huber -at- software -dot- rockwell -dot- com
Not an official Rockwell spokesman


-----Original Message-----
From:   Beth Mazur [SMTP:mazur -at- MAYA -dot- COM]
Sent:   Wednesday, April 02, 1997 8:14 AM
To:     TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject:        Re: Hiring Practices

...

In our seminars, we did instruct managers not to ask this information.
Not because it is illegal to do so, but because if you do ask, then
the burden of proof is on the hiring manager to prove that they did
not use that information in their decision.

Given this, I suspect that searching the net as part of the hiring
process is not remotely illegal (unless it leads a manager to discriminate
against a member of a protected class). Of course the ethics of searching
the net as part of hiring practice is a completely different discussion.

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