A while back Zoë posted her thoughts on the function of weblogs as “living resumes,” and she said that while she doesn’t feel a blog replaces a resume, the content can greatly enhance the snapshot of your expertise and experience. She wrote:
The end game here is that I think blogs are great for enhancing someone’s resume. They are like an online portfolio of your work if you chose to use it in that manner. I can send this information off to a hiring manager in addition to the resume and they have added information in order to make decisions. The more information we have, the better calibration we make, the more informed we are in our decision making and on and on and so forth etc.
Over the weekend, someone on our internal blogger alias started a discussion on how weblogging exposes your personal opinions to the public eye and posed the following questions:
What will happen when I go for another job, will the blog be pulled up by a future employer? What about a stupid idea or prediction I made 5 years ago, will that be held against me?
I joined in the conversation and reiterated many of the same thoughts Zoë had. Yes, it’s very likely that a potential employer (even during the initial interview process) may come across your weblog, but unless you post something extremely crass, rude, or unethical, your weblog should supplement your resume and, we believe, will ultimately help you. I also mentioned that I sometimes google potential candidates’ names to see if I can find a personal homepage or weblog – not with the intent of finding dirt on the candidate … but rather to gain supplemental information to make better decisions.
In response, a friend e-mailed me privately and said:
Does googling someone’s name cross the line? I can’t control what’s on the internet; I can only control what’s on my resume. If I put personal information on my resume, I did it to myself. But, if the recruiter finds personal information about me via the internet (accidentally or on purpose), there’s nothing I can do to counter this (or know it has happened). In some cases it could be an invasion of privacy, since information is so overly-connected. …. It’s not so much that I have something to hide, but I want to be in control of how I’m presented to the recruiter. [There is personal] information the recruiter should not know about unless I give them permission to know about it.
This is a great point. Prospective employers are not allowed to touch on personal subjects such as age, religious affiliation, martial status, etc during the interview process, but a lot of this information can be found via a simple search on the person’s name. Aside from a candidate’s personal blog, a search can also return others’ blogs, association membership, newspaper articles, etc. You can easily find a lot of “personal” information on someone with out having to ask them for it. (Just for the record, I googled my friend’s name and employer, and in the first two pages of returned results - as much as I’d ever care to dig -, each page directly related to this person’s job and experience.)
Here’s my take: 1) I think it’s all about intent. When I search for a candidate’s name, I’m not trying to find personal information … I just want to better calibrate the candidate’s experience for potential openings. Any information I can get helps. 2) Information on the internet sits in a public domain – like it or not. That doesn’t give me license to search a candidate’s name with the intent of disqualifying him for his religious beliefs (which, of course, I’d never do!), but it’s also not like I’m hacking in to an encrypted site with the intention of exposing purposefully private information. Anything I find is out there for everyone else to see, too.
Finding information on the internet is similar to calling references on someone’s resume. Often, if recruiters really want to find out information about a candidate, they will not just rely on the candidate’s provided references. The listed references will mostly likely say completely positive statements about the candidate, and the recruiter/company will only get part of the story. Again, it’s not that the recruiter wants to bust someone – but they do want the whole picture. In my case, I’ll often ask candidates if they know anyone else at Microsoft, or I’ll contact current employees who used to work for the candidate’s employer to see if they happen to know this person. This gives me a more complete picture.
That said, I would never discount someone from an interview process based solely on third party information found via the internet or a single reference. That’s like trusting a tabloid. If I read or hear something particularly troubling about a candidate, I want to discuss the source of that information with the candidate and hear both sides of the story.
The one thing I am wary of is first person information – but it would have to be pretty bad. To raise red flags, someone would have to either write or say something that showed very poor judgment or that would lead me to question the person’s ethics. Not too long ago, one of the groups I supported wanted each candidate to answer a problem solving type question via e-mail before moving forward to the next stage in the process. I sent this question to about 100 people. A few weeks later, I googled a line from the question and found one of the candidates had posed the question to a message board and turned in an answer back to me that was the exact copy of what someone on the board had told him. Funny thing is that the answer he submitted was wrong. At that point, even if he had submitted the correct answer, I'd question moving him through the process. I know people cheat in interviews all the time – especially if it’s a “take home test,” but I caught this one by doing an obvious check that was readily available to me.
The information age has definitely required us to be more mindful of what we say, write, and do. And likewise, we have to ensure we use these powers for good instead of evil. :)
What do you think about using internet search engines to find additional information on a person? Is it a violation of privacy … or is it using a readily available tool to the best of its ability?
gretchen
