Explaining your Data Double: Confessions and Self-Examination in Job Recruitments
The following is a blog post from Anna Hedenus and Christel Backman, whose new article, “Explaining the Data Double: Confessions and Self-Examination in Job Recruitments” appears in the new open issue of Surveillance & Society.
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Some years ago, we started to come across stories on employers who searched for information online about jobseekers. There were students who had experienced it; a friend’s employer who revealed that he had initially been hesitant to hire her after finding out online that she had been active in the union; an acquaintance who always ‘googled’ before hiring summer staff to their restaurant, and so on. Soon, articles that advised jobseekers on how to manage their online persona or instructing employers on how to find information online, began to pop up. These articles, now familiar to us all, are filled with advices on what not to post online. Often they include references to actual cases, like the Swedish childcare worker wearing a hat with the text ‘porn star’ on his Facebook profile and who, because of this, did not get his temporary contract renewed. But none seemed to know for sure how recruiters were thinking, what they looked for, or how harsh their judgements would be. Can you never post a picture of a night out without being perceived as an alcoholic? If you did something stupid five years ago, and this is easily found online, should you just give up on finding a job?
We became curious. We knew that the contemporary literature on recruitment advocates competency based recruitment, i.e. to base hiring decisions on a match between the requirements for the job position and the jobseeker’s competence. So how is this new practice joined with the ideal of competency based recruitment? Moreover, we wanted to understand this practice in relation to frequently raised concerns on ‘bad’ recruitments resulting in discrimination, or less creative and productive organisations. Would recruiters really base hiring decisions on information found online — information that could be private, old, misinterpreted or just false? And if they did, what would be the consequences for jobseekers and organisations?
Would recruiters really base hiring decisions on information found online — information that could be private, old, misinterpreted or just false?
We sat out to interview Swedish employers, hiring managers and HR-staff. In this newly published article, we describe how negative information found online about jobseekers did not necessarily mean that they are not offered a job. Instead, our interviews show that recruiters interpret search results in relation to if, and how, the jobseeker willingly testify to the recruiter about the information. If the jobseeker confesses in a manner that shows the recruiter that the jobseeker is honest, transparent, self-reflective and has a capacity for personal development, she or he may very well be considered as employable even though there are records online of, for example, crimes or financial difficulties.
As it seems then, you can still post pictures on your night out. But you have to keep track on the information that can be found about you, and be prepared to talk about it with a potential employer. For jobseekers who are willing to do this, it can add to their employability. Still, it is the employer who has the final say in what information should be revealed, and how to interpret and evaluate that information, while the jobseeker’s control over what information that belongs to their personal or private sphere is weak.
The questions this leaves us with are: is this acceptable to us? And if not, how should this practice be regulated or restricted?
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Read “Explaining the Data Double: Confessions and Self-Examination in Job Recruitments” here.
