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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

As a hiring manager, I expect candidates to have a LinkedIn profile that is up to date. A LinkedIn profile is a public copy of your resume; other people can see it and flag if you make inaccurate claims. I can also see how you're connected to me (it's a very rare web developer who isn't a few degrees away from me, mostly because of my time at Yahoo) and use those people to work out where you are in the industry, and get background information from them. Public recommendations are good (the skills endorsements list much less so).

If you don't have a LinkedIn profile, I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good. [Edit: per comments below, you might have some deep principled reason for not using social networks. In this case my metric is wrong, but I'm okay with having a false negative once in a while.]

Expecting everyone to have and maintain their own domain probably isn't practical, but even for those that do, the discoverability of that domain is low: I don't search google to find developers, I search LinkedIn. That's what it's for, and it's really pretty good at it.

They do some really dumb UI stuff around privacy that is trivially worked around using Incognito. I wish they didn't, but it's not dumb enough to make me abandon the giant utility of the network as a whole.

[Update: I took this thread to Twitter and got a bunch of really cogent arguments, including that LinkedIn enables harrassment/stalking of marginalized groups. That's more than a few isolated people who don't like social networks or object to the dark pattern UI, that's a systemic flaw. So I'm going to change my hiring practices to take that into account. Thanks, everybody!]

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I know I am not going to change your modus operandi, but I must publicly point out that I fully, absolutely, disagree with how you execute your hiring. If you were working for me, you'd soon be working for someone else.

Your approach is a minimal-effort Pareto principle based hiring. By eschewing any and all candidate information sources other than the market leader professional social network, you get access to a pool of 80% of the candidates with minimal effort. For you, it's great. For your company, it's passable. For the candidates, it's disgusting.

I know many professionals, top of their class, that do not maintain their LinkedIn profile. Some don't even have one (usually out of principle). You absentmindedly dismiss these 95th percentile professionals in the "junior, shady or clueless" category. It reeks of profiling, smells like laziness and must be called out as bad practice.

> For you, it's great. For your company, it's passable. For the candidates, it's disgusting.

Not the OP and playing a bit of devil's advocate but why do I care what's best for candidates? If I'm able to hire the people I need then I don't really care if there's a group of developers that I'll never find.

That's a choice you make when you take your principled stand.

It's not central to the argument, because the OP's position is obviously suboptimal for the company. However, yours is an interesting view, and a point in my argument that does require clarification.

Current good management practices envision managing as optimizing company behavior for all company stakeholders. In past times, management optimized for shareholder profit. Optimizing for shareholder profit alone has been repeatedly proven not sustainable. It usually leads to very spectacular failures, which themselves cause the public notion that all management is still shareholder-oriented. Not all companies are managed like this. Successful ones manage their relationship with all stakeholders. It is in this view that caring for candidates is important.

In this view, in order to maximize long term profit, you should aim to create positive effects on every individual or organization that somehow interfaces with your company. This is obviously theoretical, and impractical. Sometimes it is just not possible, and anyhow you have to give higher importance to central stakeholders (shareholders, customers, employees). However, when the cost is not too high, you should strive for positive impacts.

In hiring, the cost of reviewing non-standard resumes is not relevant. The cost of causing a bad impression on the random important candidate that you decline, or the cost of missing an excellent hire, is relevant. The OP's position is fundamentally wrong.

Unfortunately, the OP's position is held, in varying forms, by many in this industry. How many have said they won't hire someone without a Github profile? Without Open Source contributions? Without a direct personal network connection? If they spent too long at $BIG_STODGY_COMPANY? I have come to the conclusion that most companies don't give a shit about candidates as long as they are getting enough. Hell, even some companies that bitch and moan about "talent shortages" seem to have their own Pareto principle bullshit getting in their way.

Well yes, all of those criteria are bad business, if taken as absolutes. They can all be factors, for sure. But as absolute requirements, they just weed out good candidates.

> I have come to the conclusion that most companies don't give a shit about candidates as long as they are getting enough. Hell, even some companies that bitch and moan about "talent shortages" seem to have their own Pareto principle bullshit getting in their way.

It sounds like a lot of the companies you've encountered have embraced irrational business practices. That can definitely happen. I'm not convinced it's the norm, though. And I'm sure that it shouldn't be.

Lets not forget about the companies who create incredibly lengthy "tests" to test their potential hires.

I don't mind short coding examples. Thats cool. However when a company asks for web applications... come on. Not everyone is jobless and has time to jump through that many hoops.

What am I asking for? Learn how to identify talent... have people master that skill. The insecurity about "would this guy be good?" lets make him/her jump through a billion hoops just to work here is irritating.

If I'm able to hire the people I need then I don't really care if there's a group of developers that I'll never find.

Homogenising for efficiency carries long term risk. If you don't have several primary sources for hiring, then not only are you artificially narrowing your available pool, but you are also introducing a single point of failure. To borrow a phrase, if something goes badly wrong, Linkedin can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.

I'm shocked to learn that having a LinkedIn profile is a requirement for working at npm, Inc. (where seldo works).

That is contrary to the stereotype I have of organizations like that.

Hiring managers need to filter out somehow. I know a guy who gives explicit - but not difficult - instructions for applicants. Anything not following the instructions gets circular filed. Another silicon valley exec was famous here, recently, for trashing applicants who like country music.

Luckily for him, he's working for himself. I can find that out with a couple of Google queries and a LinkedIn profile.

But I have no idea whether you work for yourself, for someone else, or whether you're a hiring manager.

Funny, I've seen the argument made that developers target iOS first or sometimes exclusively because you make way more money there then on Android and it's much easier to maintain vs the huge ecosystem that is Andriod. By doing that you're screwing over an even large percentage of people, in this case users, but rarely have I heard anyone here complain nearly as much about it. How is this much different?

Not working for people who chose a specific brand of operating system cannot be reasonably called 'screwing over' those people, whichever that OS is, especially if those people won't pay for the work.

No, at different levels it is the approach everybody takes. The concept of search cost[1] always existed in economy. You can think that an answer to your question is in some obscure web site but if that web site is in the #1000 position in Google, very few people will find it.

Regarding LinkedIn, I think if you want to increase the probability of being hired in US (and other countries where LinkedIn is popular) you must be there. You can argue against it like I argue about needing to have a Skype, or a PayPal account to receive payments: everybody is there, network effects, etc.

- [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_cost

But it's not a binary choice between a) excluding everyone without LinkedIn and b) spending an infinite amount on search. Surely, there are affordable ways to evaluate engineering candidates other than their LinkedIn profiles. For example, looking at resumes alone is often sufficient to exclude 90% of applicants, simply because 90% of applicants list no relevant skills or experience.

I agree and I experienced some few exceptions to seldo thinking. For example, friends who are incredible capable and extremely focused on their field. It works for them because they are known from conferences and specific software groups.

> I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good.

I'm quite certain I'm none of those things. I'm gainfully employed and well-respected. Yet I'm not on LinkedIn. Why? Because I prefer to minimize my social media footprint, because I've heard a lot of things about LinkedIn that rub me the wrong way, and because I don't see a clear value proposition.

So no, my absence from LinkedIn has nothing to do with me being a bad candidate for a job. If you assume it does, you miss out on a good hire.

I think any statement of the form "a person who doesn't use product X is necessarily a bad candidate" is absurd, unless product X is something like disinfectant and the job is something like doctor.

They're not necessarily a bad candidate, but I have a lot of resumes to scan and this metric works most of the time. I'm okay with getting it wrong sometimes.

I didn't intend this to be taken as a personal affront to people who don't use LinkedIn, so I should have used less inflammatory language. My apologies.

The few very, very excellent developers I know are not on LI, and keep away from it. Why? Because they're so good they will probably never need such a tool, finding work was never an issue.

I think you're actually shooting yourself in the foot, and as someone else mentioned - you're actually missing out on the very best developers out there by taking the shortest, easiest path to recruiting.

> I have a lot of resumes to scan and this metric works most of the time.

Works in what sense? Does it reliably help you make the best hires? Are you sure? (I hypothesize that it does not, and you might not even know it.)

Yes, every hiring manager has lots of resumes to scan. But I wouldn't consider that a logical justification for establishing an arbitrary criterion that's likely to weed out some of the very best candidates. (As others have stated, there anecdotally appears to be a trend wherein the very best don't bother with LinkedIn.)

> I think any statement of the form "a person who doesn't use product X is necessarily a bad candidate" is absurd, unless product X is something like disinfectant and the job is something like doctor.

I've been casting about for a way to illustrate clearly what I mean by "tech snobbery". Many of my conversations go in a direction similar to this (scrollaway > seldo > jarrret). Your sentence will help me. Thank you.

:) To devil's advocate myself, though:

Where does this logic end? On the extreme end of the spectrum, we can agree that a doctor who skips the disinfectant is categorically a bad hire. But what about less extreme cases? Where do we draw the line? What about a developer who doesn't use version control? Or who doesn't use automated tests? What if they do use those things, but within those genres, they've chosen tools you happen to despise?

So I think it's tricky to know which products should be considered mandatory for quality hires.

That being said, I still stand by my comment on LinkedIn. The more debatable examples I gave above are tools that directly affect the quality and efficiency of a developer's work. LinkedIn is not, and that's a pretty big distinction.

> So no, my absence from LinkedIn has nothing to do with me being a bad candidate for a job.

- I agree completely.

>If you assume it does, you miss out on a good hire.

- Again, I agree completely.

On the other hand, any company that vets potential employees by LinkedIn, or any single metric or source, isn't a company that I want to work for. So my lack of presence there helps weed out companies that I don't want to work for anyway.

The value I see in my LinkedIn profile is, first of all, the ability to keep in touch with colleagues from my previous jobs.

Also, I find some of the LinkedIn groups pretty good. Gone are the good old days of Usenet, unfortunately, and there are niche topics for which I can't find better forums than some LinkedIn groups.

Oh absolutely, if it delivers value to you in those ways, by all means use it. I don't think it would help me personally in that regard, but if it did, I might reconsider.

I suspect that LinkedIn is more useful to some people than others. And that's fine. Most products are like that. My comment above was really just arguing against the idea that LinkedIn usage somehow correlates with the quality of a candidate.

> If you don't have a LinkedIn profile, I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good.

How about smarter than you, because that is one hell of a stupid position.

I don't have a LinkedIn (or Facebook, or Google+ or whatever) because I don't sit and spew my details all over the internet. For job searches, another reason I don't use LinkedIn is because I have worked with people that I do not want to be associated with. That I have is not important to my looking for a job now.

You don't need a public, updated copy of my resume, you'll get my resume if I'm interested in working at a place. Don't worry, you won't have to worry about it.

I guess another benefit of not using LinkedIn is not working at places that promote idiotic practices such as this.

I agree with everything, but there is that small point that if you don't want to be associated with people you worked with, it does fall into the "shady" category, at least somewhat. I'm sure you have a great reason, and that's why social constructs are much more complicated then whatever LinkedIn's system does and probably will ever do.

And to gf - I'm glad you agree on missing out on people, because some of the best people I know don't have an up-to-date profile, and I'd hate for them to work with people who update their profile too often :)

How is it shady? We happened to be hired at same place. I think they're assholes and would not want any first impression of me to be tainted by them.

shady: of doubtful honesty or legality

I suppose everyone who went to high school with Dahmer is shady too since for reasons out of their control they all went to the same school for a period of time. I doubt they feel the need to broadcast that information even though a little bit of extra looking would reveal the information.

Hiding connections to previous workplaces is shady to a hiring manager because the assumption will be that you were the problem, not them. Why else would you hide anything?

The saying applies "You run into an asshole in the morning, okay, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day long, you're the asshole."

It's the same reason you don't badmouth previous employers or coworkers in a job interview.

Not listing who you have worked with is not hiding anything. They're hiring me, not the people I've worked with. All they need to know is the places I have worked and the responsibilities I had there and that's on my resume. A hiring manager does not need to know that I worked with Bob while I was there, it is not important to the process.

Yes, they could find out that I worked with Bob because Bob does spew all his details everywhere, but I am not presenting it to them as part of my resume. I also don't list the people I've worked with that I would work with again. They're hiring me, not the people that happened to work at some places I was at the same time.

> It's the same reason you don't badmouth previous employers or coworkers in a job interview.

Yet it's perfectly fine for their reputation to bad mouth me by association. That's what LinkedIn's network does.

> If you don't have a LinkedIn profile, I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good.

pg's is basically empty.

don knuth doesn't have one.

bruce schneier doesn't have one.

and thomas ptacek's declares:

I hereby declare LinkedIn bankruptcy. LinkedIn sends me so much spam that my mail client refuses to show me its messages anymore. If you try to ping me here, I may never notice. Sorry!

You'd be able to get away with it, if it wasn't for us meddling kids.

> Expecting everyone to have and maintain their own domain probably isn't practical,

for web developers? why would you hire a web developer that didn't have their own domain?

pg, knuth and schneier are practically household names, and ptacek is very googlable. If they're looking for employment, I don't think that a scanty LinkedIn profile is going to be the dealbreaker.

...so there is another category?

I think so: if your name is famous enough, hiring managers will ignore their own rules.

Also, if you went to a top tier school for your subject, most of the rules are ignored. My profile is partially completed, and I haven't updated most of it in a while. I always get a callback when I submit a resume; even if it's a position I'm grossly underqualified for.

If someone knows you, then you have a good chance of scoring an interview; otherwise it's almost impossible, at least in phd-level computer science.

So... no work experience?

> why would you hire a web developer that didn't have their own domain?

As stated in my other comments, I'm in the not-Linked-In camp. But still, I must take issue with the above. I happen to own a number of domain names, but I don't have a personal site at the moment. That's simply because I don't need one. At the moment, I successfully rely on other signals of my trustworthiness as an engineer.

When would I want to create a personal site? If I worked on many small projects for many small clients, I'd constantly be in a sales cycle, so I'd have a personal site for that purpose.

So in answer your question: "why would you hire a web developer that didn't have their own domain?" I'd hire such a web developer if she were qualified, quite simply. If she lacked a personal site because she had to practical reason to create one, I wouldn't hold that against her. I'd think it reflected well on her judgment of priorities.

It is interesting to hear that some hiring managers consider Linked In a requirement.

The problem, for some of us, is that it's awful awful software. It sends spams to our contacts. It is very difficult and unpleasant to use. It is hard to keep accurate and up to date. We don't like sharing our information with it, because we don't trust Linked In.

That is the reason many of us avoid using Linked In, rather than an objection to social networks in general. (Although some of have that too).

Of course, if it's actually harming our job application prospects, I suppose some of us would reconsider. For most actual programmers, it probably isn't, but who knows.

The more general question here is -- what do we do when there's a social website that has become so popular that it's considered a requirement in at least some communities for hiring, and is one of the best ways to network because everyone is on it -- but is also just a terrible terrible website, in terms of both their UI and their business ethics, and we just dont want to use it. Apparently we've found the answer to how Linked In can get away with being so awful though, they've got the network effect and people have to use it anyway.

> If you don't have a LinkedIn profile, I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good.

Similarly, if a hiring manager requires a LinkedIn profile, I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good.

I wonder which one of us is right?

the one with the money

In this industry, I'm sure that's both of us.

I expect candidates to have a LinkedIn profile that is up to date [...] If you don't have a LinkedIn profile, I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless

This is very ... interesting. So the next thing is to expect everyone be active on Facebook, otherwise they're socially awkward and perhaps mentally unstable?

EDIT:

I should have probably provided my personal experience with LI - I had LI profile for ages, and keep on maintaining it. No good ever came out of it - lots of spam, that's all. From hiring managers mostly.

Like I said, I ignore Facebook for hiring purposes because I think the context is different. You're not expecting me to go looking at it, so I don't.

Well, there is a parallel. Not being on Facebook is very odd, so it's pretty rational to expect the person to be odd as well. In my experience it's mostly a privacy thing. Not a well-developed opinion necessarily, just an instinctual mistrust to orgs that collect lots of personal information.

WTH? I'm not on Facebook, or any other kind of social network. I don't find myself to be "out of the norm".

I don't need Facebook. In fact, nobody needs. I have the need to share what I do with everybody and I surely don't want to see every details of my friend's list. You know how I talk to them? Face to face. I give them a call, ask them if they whant to have a cup of coffee and talk about what's up.

Now, everyone I tell this responds with "What about those people you don't see a long time ago, or are away, or have been in your clas in the nth grade?" For those that are away, I use email and skype. For the rest, well, there's a reason I haven't talked to them in a long time.

There's also the point of events. I like to invited personally. Even a text is enough. I feel like the person really remembered me, and didn't just click a "send all" button.

And finaly, there's friend bloat. Lots of people I meet ask me for my facebook. they would invite me, I would add them and never remove them because of common courtesy and because of common friend pressure. "X asked me why you unfriended him. Did something happen?" No, I just don't give a damn about his cat!

I don't like facebook and I don't need facebook. I find that, while it may have some interesting uses, is just used for gloating and voyerism.

Why are people downvoting this?

Other than the unnecessary "WTH?" at the start, this is a thoughtful and considered response. Is it just the sentiment that is unpopular?

Agreed, a responsible reaction I think. It's probably getting downvoted because their are a few people on HN that are financially invested in facebook becoming obnoxiously ubiquitous.

Whether you consider yourself "out of the norm" or not has no bearing on whether you actually are. Spoiler alert: You are out of the norm.

He just gave a list of rather good reasons why a normal person might not use facebook. Yes, it is quite uncommon to see a facebook-less person nowadays. But why do you think this implies that a person who doesn't use facebook is necessarily not normal?

Nothing necessary about it. Just probably. Normal people obviously do not think these reasons are good enough not to be on Facebook, which raises the question why does he? Probably because he's not normal.

Why do you say that normal people do not think these reasons good enough? Why can't both the facebook-users and the non-facebook-users be normal?

I sure wasn't expecting replies to my (angry) rant.

To start, I later realised my tone was angrier than it should. For that, I apologise. The "out of the norm" comment really ticked me in a weird way. (I don't know why, but it just did).

Now, to answer you, as this is a reply to your post.

What I really wanted to convey is that I don't need facebook. I don't think Facebook is bad. I don't hate it. But I don't like it either. I respect it as a product, and understand the impact it had in society. But don't think I don't use it only for the bad stuff I said earlier. I just don't see any use for it.

So, for a tl,dr: I don't think those reason are enough for me not to be on facebook. I'm not on facebook because I don't see enough reasons to use it. It's not "too much bad", it's "too few good".

I don't mean this in a mean way, but I'm actually happy that you use this heuristic. I don't want to work at a place where doing what everyone else is doing is valued for its own sake, and you're making this easy for me.

I guess I'm thankful tech work is a seller's market.

As a talented developer, I expect my hiring manager to look beyond a scummy, spammy social network to do their job. If he or she refuses, that's fine. That's a big red flag, and I can look elsewhere for a better fit.

> other people can see it and flag if you make inaccurate claims

Hah ha ha... When I see resume inflating on LI, you think I'm going to annoy someone I already have a relationship with by flagging it so recruiters can get accurate information?

> As a hiring manager, I expect candidates to have a LinkedIn profile that is up to date.

It's nothing personal, but if I ever encountered that while job searching, I would turn tail and run.

I dunno about you, but an engineer that has a web presence at their own domain and no linkedin profile is the exact opposite of clueless in my book. It tells me that they realized that they are solid sought after engineers that realized that they can increase the signal vs noise with respect to recruiting.

This HackerNewsOnion tweet best lampoons this phenomena: https://twitter.com/HackerNewsOnion/status/40645726639764275...

My resume is up to date at /resume.html. Sorry that's not good enough for you. Good luck.

EDIT: Just want to point out that seldo is a co-founder of npm, Inc. where (i'm assuming) he currently works. So apparently to work for npm, you must have and maintain a LinkedIn profile. I find this disturbing for an otherwise important and great company.

There's another reason to not be on LinkedIn, and that is that I don't need to be.

Also as a hiring manager, I DON'T care if you have a linkedIN profile. I do care that you can do the work required well and that you'll be a pleasure to work with.

> I do care that you can do the work required well and that you'll be a pleasure to work with.

Note that this is at a different level of abstraction from "I do/don't care if you have linkedin".

Roughly speaking, seldo said "I use <proxy> to attempt to predict performance" and you said "I don't care about <proxy>, I care about performance".

I have to nitpick because it's important. seldo said, "I expect candidates to make themselves available to the <proxy> I've chosen to predict performance."

> They do some really dumb UI stuff around privacy that is trivially worked around using Incognito.

I didn't realize I could work-around the privacy concerns of publishing personal details on a social network by doing it in Incognito mode. Fascinating.

Hiring managers seem to be the only people in the world who think LinkedIn has any value whatsoever.

You wouldn't hire me, and I'm OK with that; I'm not going to feed a bunch of data into a scumbag spam factory like LinkedIn just to make your job easier.

A couple of years ago, I would have agreed with this.

But at this point, if you're not active on GitHub and/or StackOverflow (assuming you're hiring for open source technologies), I likely am not interested in wasting my time vetting out your resume.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure if I see tons of benefit in keeping a personal website up to date. Designs go out of style so quickly, one would have to re-do their site every 2-3 years or get caught looking stale. It's not worth the effort to a hardcore coder when there's more "fun" projects to play with. Most great coders don't want to whore themselves.

Your comment is a very good one... in 2009.

I know people think this way. But its pretty hard on minorities/women who don't want their github/stackoverflow accounts tied to a identifer to avoid harassment.

"So I'm going to change my hiring practices to take that into account."

As an employee, I expect managers to change their opinions when provided with evidence and/or cogent arguments. You've passed, well done.

>Expecting everyone to have and maintain their own domain probably isn't practical

Depends on the job. I fully expect a web developer of any type to be able to set up and maintain a domain.

And I Google the daylights out of candidates. LinkedIn is usually towards the bottom of the list for things I check.

> it's a very rare web developer who isn't a few degrees away from me

Is it possible you're getting the cause and effect the wrong way round and it's just that your current search method rarely finds a candidate that isn't a few degrees away from you? It would be interesting to have a follow up if you find your new hiring practices find more candidates that you couldn't have found via the social graph.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't researching the background of a candidate beyond the contents of their resume - in other words expecting them to have and inspecting their LinkedIn profile - illegal?

Nope, but thinking someone's inexperienced or untrustworthy because they don't have the business equivalent of a MySpace account is pretty stupid.

It is a reasonable yellow flag in most industries. It isn't perfect evidence of them being inexperienced or untrustworthy, but it does increase the chance, at the population level, of that being true.

Having zero online presence would be a reasonable flag, but if you can't find them on LinkedIn but go on to find them on GitHub, StackExchange, forums relevant to their industry, and/or a personal web site, then I would say that quite exceeds the value of a LinkedIn profile in terms of experience and trust.

Those are all ways to allay the yellow flag, yes, and in an exhaustive search you'd easily pass the tests. But you still raise the flag/concern in a lot of cases. And if the evaluation is perfunctory, everyone with a yellow flag might get cut for ease.

It probably hurts candidates at least a little on the average over the long term, even when they have everything you've mentioned.

> Having zero online presence would be a reasonable flag

Why?

I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand the situation it's illegal to take certain types of information into account when making hiring decisions (e.g. race, gender, religion I think, sexuality in some states, etc.). It's not illegal to go looking for more information about a candidate, but if in the course of doing so you also find information in those protected categories, it would be illegal to use that information. The act of finding it out is not itself illegal. The morality of doing so on a network not intended for professional purposes -- like Facebook, say -- is questionable. I don't do that.

All that said, a LinkedIn profile specifically is obviously intended for public information, so finding it and reading it seems morally 100% okay in my book, and I do this all the time. I also google applicants to find their Github profiles if they haven't supplied them, and that seems fair to me too.

> I also google applicants to find their Github profiles if they haven't supplied them, and that seems fair to me too.

We've done somewhat the reverse...we had a script that would use the GitHub API to find projects using certain technologies, measure them according to certain metrics (test coverage, LoC, etc) and resolve them to GitHub profiles which were filtered for location and then reviewed manually. The ones that passed we resolved to LI profiles and contacted about our open positions.

It worked well and almost completely eliminated any discrimination along any protected class. Then again, we may have been violating the GitHub ToS, so a lawyer probably would have dinged us on that. Still, it was such an effective recruiting technique that it may be worth it. And reviewing code in GitHub is so much more enjoyable (and informative) than sifting through resumes.

> I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand the situation it's illegal to take certain types of information into account when making hiring decisions (e.g. race, gender, religion I think, sexuality in some states, etc.).

I'm appalled that you are somebody that hires for a living and you don't know the basic legalities of your profession.

My name is already registered at Github by someone else, and it's not a common name at all. I just hope they're good!

Why would it be illegal? How would that law even be written? You'd have to define what a "resume" is, and probably create a government form to serve as a resume, and force employers to only hire people who submit that specific form...

The law could simply say employees must only consider things the applicants have submitted themselves. I can think of a few reasons for such a law - applicants have no control over the internet (eg if I share my name with some criminal who turns up when my interviewer googles me), and this makes it harder for employees to discriminate based on protected categories (race, sex, marital status etc).

But as the other replies have said, it's not illegal today.

No, there is nothing illegal about that at all (at least in the United States, as a general principle of law) but that appears to be a very common misconception here on Hacker News. (Thank you for saying "correct me if I'm wrong," indicating that you desire to learn something here on Hacker News.) In general, an employer has somewhat of a DUTY to hire carefully, especially if the people the employer hires will have access to personal information of other persons, or to dangerous instrumentalities, or could otherwise cause criminal or civil harm on the job. Employers who are well advised about the law of "negligent hiring and supervision" and the legal exposure that companies can have from a careless or evil employee take care to check references, to ask the references for back references, and to include a job applicant authorization for an appropriate background check (usually contingent on a firm job offer, but also as a condition for continued employment) as part of the hiring process. Employers are allowed to find out, and are EXPECTED to find out, reliable information about the public workplace behavior of the people they hire.

Thinking that the job applicant can control the information flow in the entire process by how the applicant fills out a resume or an application form is one of the biggest misconceptions nonlawyers here on Hacker News have about employment law (again, at least in the United States, the jurisdiction I know best). To the best of my knowledge, there has never been, and could never be, a successful lawsuit by a rejected job applicant if an employer checked back references (for example) and found out something about the applicant's previous PUBLIC, WORKPLACE behavior that suggests that the applicant would be a bad fit for the new job.

It's not illegal it just opens your company up to all kinds of liability.

This is what I was getting at. It opens you up to accusations of discrimination.

Background checks are different to researching a candidate. They are to check that the person doesn't have a hidden criminal record, for example. Researching their private lives crosses the line.

LinkedIn is different, yes, because it's intended as a professional network publicizing your work. But you better be up-front about looking their profiles up, and even then it's troublesome because profiles often include details you would never put on a resume - such as your photo.

I think you should be very careful about researching a candidate for anything beyond normal background/credit checks.

I hope all the people who object to your methods and rationalize that they wouldn't work for you anyway, realize the hypocrisy of their statements.

Hiring manager for/where...

I guess you don't work in a field where good resources are scarce. People where I work don't even check references anymore, you might lose the candidate during the process.

other people can see it and flag if you make inaccurate claims

A glance at LinkedIn would indicate that that rarely if ever happens.

> If you don't have a LinkedIn profile, I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good.

Geez, Sherlock ...

> I assume you're either very junior, shady, or clueless, and none of those is good.

Or the kind of candidate who will pedantically lecture me about the evils of LinkedIn, which is even worse.

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