If you get rejected and don't know why, take heart: a year from now the company also won't know why. You can apply again as if it were Groundhog Day.
You have to keep in mind that if a candidate is rejected and comes back and says it was illegal discrimination, those forms are valuable evidence to show why the candidate was not selected. Get rid of the forms and it's basically your word against theirs in court.
That said, I've also been told that no one every goes to the trouble to dig those up later on. Even for current employees. You could get a letter of reprimand put in your file and nobody would probably see it again (this comment came from HR).
I was thinking for example: I can request a copy from my employer of HR docs specific to me. Does this only apply because I'm employed, or does it extend to interview notes?
Think multi device ad retargeting. How cool would it be to get back information on what the ad exchange thinks I am like...
I'm also thinking about the rights of everyone including criminal (including terror) suspects to see (I am specifically not asking permission to alter or delete, that's another conversation) all the information the government (and their agents in the private sector) stores about them.
I know it sounds onerous specially because of the issue of authentication (how does the CIA know that it is me who is asking for information about me and not someone impersonating me?) and I don't have a good solution for these questions.
"We're not banning thoughts, just those that are inside books."
Scanning paper HR records was the single most painful job we had to do. The entire file became a complete legal nightmare purely because it stopped being paper and became covered by Data Protection.
Usually the HR department had to go through every single employee file and shred any documents that might be grounds for legal action before they got scanned.
The process before scanning was: - employee is annoyed - employee requests their HR file - HR sanitise file and sends it to employee
after scanning, every single page was indexed. So they couldn't react to a request by destroying pages (because there'd be holes in the index). So they had to sanitise every single file before scanning.
I understand the point of Data Protection law, but in this case it was really counter-productive. Evidence was destroyed wholesale.
Not our HR process, our customer's. What was actually destroyed depended on their interpretation of the law.
One common one was the Data Protection requirement to not keep inaccurate data meant that all but the latest employee change of address forms had to be destroyed. Easy to implement post-scanning, pain in the arse to do pre-scanning.
When a candidate is rejected there is period of to months they can sue for discrimination. After that one additional month is considered to be justifiable. So everything has to be destroyed three months after the rejection letter if there is no discrimination case.
Isn't that the ideal situation to be in, if you're the defendant? The burden of proof rests on the employee to prove discrimination. From the company's point of view, surely, the fewer forms, the less proof.
Some jurisdictions also shift the burden of proof under some circumstances so it is actually worse for the defendant.
The process worked something like this:
1) Get approval from HR to start the hiring process. Your department needs to have the money to hire someone, and a need to fill a position. I'm not sure how either is decided.
2) Define the position. Several people are involved here, basically you define the role and the areas of expertise that you want and need.
3) Information from 2 gets sent back to all involved parties, and everyone ranks the skills by necessity and comments on things.
4) HR takes the information and creates job listings, and collects candidates.
5) Interviews take place, and you grade applications according to what you decided in 3.
6) Hire someone who satisfies the requirements and did well in the interviews.
There's some leeway in the system because the interview and the judgment of the interviewers matters, but you can't just accept somebody because you like them, and you can't reject someone because you don't.
As for what happens with an applicant's information after they're rejected... I'm not sure where it goes or whether it gets called up again if they re-apply. Our department was pretty small though, if we didn't hire you the first time, we won't have forgotten you by the second time around.
I wish we took notes during interviews. On well. We still remember candidates who apply multiple times.
To get this out of the way, here's my implementation for this year:
int main() {
return 1;
}
If you had the acting skills to convincingly give off the impression that you're a novice programmer, you've also got the skills to convincingly give off a more directly useful impression.
Although, the actual interviews and results are kept secret from the rest of the company—apart from higher-ups—I got insight into them because I was asked to filter out through some final candidates by interviewing them. I realised that they kept notes from past interviews, and based on the fact that one of the interviewees progressed a lot in a 2 year period, I was inclined to put him on top of the list of my recommendation.
I feel like the ability to change is more important than just plain knowledge. More importantly, be mature and accept you "sucked" because {reasons} and work on yourself to improve, rather than be immature and "pridefully" (for a lack of better word) refuse critique.
I don't get this mentality.
A) I seem to be unaware of the rash of lawsuits befalling companies that provide feedback. I admit I just may be ignorant of them.
B) It seems that not recording reasons actually makes the company more vulnerable. When you combine a "preponderance of evidence" legal standard with "Lies, damn lies, and statistics" it seems like it would be easy for a litigious candidate and a good lawyer to force a settlement or get a favorable jury ruling if the company cannot present hard evidence that said candidate was not hired because of X, Y, and Z non-protected reasons. In fact, that is the reason given in discussions about why it is so hard to fire people for going though the PIP process instead of just cutting them loose.
Then, jurors are free to infer that the real reason why intentional bias and the justification was just a cover story.
This is not theoretical. This is the playbook.
> that is the reason given in discussions about why it is so hard to fire people for going though the PIP process instead of just cutting them loose
That is a different case though. In the event of a firing, you have their work performance leading up to that event to take into account. If you have a black woman who has worked at a place for many years with favorable job reviews who is then suddenly let go after a new white manager is hired, they can present their work history at that company as an argument that they were let go for less than legitimate reasons.
In this case, the usual practice for proving innocence is to show that the statistical distribution of hires is similar to the statistical distribution of applicants. For example, if I had 50% latino applicants, 50% of my hires should be latinos.
That being said, the sort of publicity these issues get mean that companies try really hard to steer clear of any discrimination accusations. It's a delicate problem to handle.
Specifically, a talent acquisition manager/executive would have to make a business case about how exposing the company to liability from outsiders would somehow pay for itself.
The only plausible argument that I can think of is that you could market your recruiting process as transparent and then get some additional candidates based on that. But.. can you really postulate that some candidate that is reading about your recruiting process in depth would be highly enticed by this to actually apply, as opposed to verbiage about other perks? Can you guarantee that having a free "recruiter feedback on your application" service available to anyone out there won't create a great incentive for random candidates to apply just for that? What if there is a data leak and all this prejudicial, personally identifiable information ends up on the web?
That's just what came to mind in 5 seconds. If the argument for creafting, storing and providing the rejection information sounds like a stretch, it's because it's a tough sell.
About the actual legal requirement, OFCCP compliant companies have to record disposition reasons for candidates that they don't hire when some conditions are met (candidates have expressed interest in a position and they were evaluated based on "substantial information"). In my experience, these disposition reasons try deliberately to be vague. Regular companies don't, and most likely won't because of the liability issues mentioned above. For reference, here's the go-to FAQ on OFCCP requirements: http://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/offaqs.htm
Regardless it's just seems like there's so many opportunities to create legal trouble by giving a reason, and almost no reason against saying nothing.
From the other side of the desk, wouldn't you be impressed if you had a candidate come in for another interview, and they explicitly tell you that you had interviewed them previously and they understood their weaknesses at that time. And they're looking forward to show you just how much their chops have improved in the meantime, and then proceed to do just that?
Sure, the recruiter might be sane, but that is possibly only a small part of what gets me hired or rejected.
Most people get bonged and move on. If you weren't a fit 12 months ago, the odds (and personal bias, let's be honest) are really against you.
I used to worry about blanket rejections. Not any more. They're not actionable, so I ignore them.