Companies Unable to Justify Job Screening Practices that Discriminate
If Joseph Stalin were just entering politics today he might not do so well as he once did. The Internet makes it easy to run background checks on people and find records — even very old records — of criminal arrests and convictions. Old news stories and blog posts might be all the information available about a past indiscretion but that could prove to be more than enough to keep you from getting a dream job.
Everyone knows well enough that the economy is struggling to recover from the most recent recession. As part of the recovery process we are looking to companies to start hiring more employees. But those companies are reluctant to open up the job lines, and what little hiring is going on right now is being augmented by extensive screening practices.
Thanks to the Internet, all sorts of your background records and personal information are now online. When you apply for a job, a prospective employer may be able to identify where you went to school, who you worked for, and what your political opinions are based solely on your social media site activity. The indiscriminate use of social media has flooded the Internet with far more information than people might want to share with prospective employers.
As companies have increasingly relied on Internet-based job screening, disappointed applicants and some lawmakers are suggesting these practices are illegal. The fact that many minority applicants are being unfairly excluded from good jobs because of distant criminal convictions that have no relevance to the jobs has raised quite a few eyebrows. Surprisingly, employers who often refrain from providing negative reviews about former employers will take virtually any negative information from the Internet at face value.
Instead of judging the quality of the person by their current situation, employers may be short-changing themselves (and possibly exposing themselves to class action lawsuits or fines and penalties) by screening every applicant and turning people away on the basis of what is discovered in a background check. As a best practice, companies should probably disclose to applicants that they intend to run background checks and they should give applicants opportunities to discuss any contradictory or alarming information that arises from a background records search.