Microsoft: 70% of HR managers turn down job candidate based on online reputation
lawprofessors.typepad.com
lawprofessors.typepad.com
Actual researchy stuff: http://www.microsoft.com/privacy/dpd/research.aspx (PDF and PPT)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
At least with the idiot, you can keep an eye on him.
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.
Your sex and race are instantly apparent, age and many disabilities can be guessed, national origin can be figured from an accent, and marital status can be seen by looking for a ring. Even religion can be discerned in some cases, for certain orthodox members.
I agree that employers being able to easily see an employee's sexual orientation might not be a step in the right direction, but I don't think it's opening up a huge can of worms. It's an already opened can of worms.