Hacker News Reader

Comment by jzzskijj | Hacker News Reader

In Finland it is illegal to google for applicant's online presence, because of the possibility of judging the candidate because of misidentification. You have to have applicant's permission to that. And I am glad, because one of my name doubles isn't very representative person according to their online presence.

View on HN

I have the opposite problem, I share the name with someone else working in the tech field who is academically and professionally my senior.

I frequently get emails and phone calls from recruiters offering positions with a salary up to 200k more than I'm expecting at my level because they think I teach at Stanford

Did you ever try to bullshit your way into one of these positions? Obviously it's a bad idea, but I'm only half joking since it might be an interesting experiment to see how people rate and value you if their mind may have already been made up.

I taken a few phone interviews without realizing that they had the wrong guy.

It's never turned into an awkward situation just yet but its also never gotten further than that.

Why is that a bad idea? If you can pass the interview stages and the only difference is perception then I say go for it.

Stealing someone identity is, by definition, a bad idea.

> is, by definition, a bad idea.

So what is the definition?

This is certainly legal.

"So tell me about your time lecturing at Stanford"

"Well you see uhh thats not me but uhh..."

"I think we are done here."

And you've just burned a massive bridge.

Haha I think theyd clock I wasnt the guy they thought I was when a tattood kid in his 20s walked in the door

On a similar note, there was a TV series about faking it. (https://www.channel4.com/programmes/faking-it/episode-guide)

I have a more minor issue, in that my mum once mistook a SciFi/horror film director for me, because of his website. I also share a name with a Victorian era author. As I’m now writing a novel, I’m going to have to publish with a pen name.

People accuse me of playing Baseball, Football, and Guitar for the band TOOL.

Perfect opportunity to add a mysterious initial. Ben Ÿ. W...

If I do that, I’m adding non-latin characters. B. 狐. Я. W.

(I don’t except a publisher would let me do that).

You're undervaluing yourself.

I'm 26

Doesn't matter, it's not an army.

How is this law enforced? It seems like you could google them and discard their application for other reasons.

This also holds for eg. age and sex discrimination - find out who they are, reject them for something else. Not being able to easily enforce a law doesn't mean one should break it.

Sounds like another lip-service law that European countries like to enact and then rely on the honor system for enforcement.

Even bigger question: how is it tracked what application was discarded and why?

Sounds like a well-intentioned eurocratic nightmare.

I started a personal website because the other person with my name was a cannabis legalisation advocate.

This was the early 2000s, and I was easily able to knock him from the top spot on the major search engines.

Drugs are bad mkaaaay

The article said that the applicant googled the interviewer, though.

Yes, right after posting I realized I wasn't directly on the topic. I hope it brings some value to discussion anyway.

For what it's worth, I was initially confused as well. It's convolutedly phrased.

I'd be curious to know how well that's enforced. There's an ocean full of HR tech startups that are doing just that programmatically, to produce scores on all sorts of things to rate candidates.

Sounds like all those HR tech startups would violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence.

If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them. Don't go behind their back making judgements based on websites, facebook profiles or reddit accoints that are likely to be wrong.

Not disagreeing at all. Just spelling out the unfortunate direction that hiring tools are heading towards.

> violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence

No they shouldn't. What they should do though is geoblock all access coming to their sites and services which they can identify as coming from EU origin, plus add to their site EULA that anyone under EU jurisdiction is not authorized to use their site under any circumstances and such access will be considered unauthorized access, which is a criminal act.

> If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them

That's two of the most likely sources of lies. Neither has much value.

The only page where my full name appears in on my LinkedIn page; I tried searching for it, both on bing and duckduckgo my LinkedIn page was on the second page of results, with a handfull of LinkedIn profiles I've never seen and which are not linked to my profile beforehand. Google got it as the first result, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com