April 16, 2007 at 6:12 pm
one very small step further... a quick google of a potential employee's name can reveal all sorts of information about their personality... including what political parties they have contributed to. The real question is, can you draw the line. In the part of the country I currently live in, it's far too often that the best piece of experience you could have on your resume is what church you go to.
I still say, bond your employees, let some other company be responsible for knowing the things that as a manager, it's just best that you don't know.
Personally, I want to know a potential employee's qualifications first and foremost. From there, it's up to HR to get them bonded, but, I don't want to risk having someone's religious, political, etc motivations color my judgement.
April 17, 2007 at 9:48 am
it is, of course, illegal to base employment on political parties, religous or ethnic associations.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
April 17, 2007 at 10:06 am
Yeah but it's not illegal to put it on your resume and take your chances. Sometimes it will help, but most times not. If you're applying to work with Focus on the Family, it's a requirement. For a long time I had a gay support web site on my resume as an example of my work. I'm not sure if it helped or hurt, but nobody ever asked about it (not a good sign, I think).
April 19, 2007 at 8:16 am
that it is illegal is reason enough to not want to know that information, or to be poking around in any way that might reveal that information, or lead you to possibly make any conclusions about that type of information.
There have been several occurrences in the past 8 years where people have been arrested for politically motivated protest. There is a case where I don't want to know why someone was arrested, because it could effect my judgement in ways that I would not feel comfortable with. It's a small jump from a background check that shows a history of being involved in borderline protest type activities to just plain judging on political, or religious affiliation.
As managers we've all had the ethnic discrimination stuff drilled home, and for the most part, we've learnt to put that aside, but, it's a lot easier to stop judging based on someone's skin color then it is to stop judging based upon the things that make us us. particularly if you are strong in your convictions.
BTW: Jasmine, for me, your resume would have probably given me a negative impression. Not because of what it is, but because there are some things that I don't think belong on a resume. I actually leave off several things I would like to put on my resume, but, they would reveal my political, and religious beliefs, and I simply don't want to risk that being part of what an employer takes into account when hiring me. I also know that it would be a distraction from my actual abilities regardless of how it was taken, and as such would likely reflect negatively on me.
Basically, there are things an employer should not take into account when choosing an employee. Don't point those things out. It gives someone who would judge you on those things "reason" to do so, and for those who wouldn't, it puts them on the defensive.
April 19, 2007 at 8:51 am
Have you people been in a cave this past week?
Clearly, a background check, both criminal and medical, would have revealed that deranged lunatic at Virginia Tech as what he is and perhaps would have him behind bars rather than being "the right person for the job". But, of course, we have to worry about his cival liberties, we have to protect his privacy while 32 innocent human beings liberties have been denied forever.
If some stupid manager denies a person a job because of his skin color, creed, nationality, sexual orientation, etc, then that manager places his company at risk. There is recourse in the courts for such discrimination. There is no recourse once someone is dead.
"... There have been several occurrences in the past 8 years where people have been arrested for politically motivated protest."
I don't know what country some of you folks are in, but in the USA, no one is arrested for political activities. NO ONE!! The only people that are arrested at political protests are those that do something illeagal.
NO ONE is arrested for religious beliefs either. NO ONE. If they are, the courts provide recourse.
NO ONE is arrested for their sexual oriention. NO ONE. If they are, the courts provide recourse.
NO ONE is arrested for being disabled. NO ONE. If they are, the courts provide recourse.
"There is a case where I don't want to know why someone was arrested, because it could effect my judgement..."
Please don't tell you're really serious? That's what a manger does. He or she are PAID to make prudent judgements. You don't hire people just because they write great code. You hire people for that and other reasons as well.
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!
April 19, 2007 at 9:54 am
I'm ignoring the political rhetoric, both sides have suffered the same issues with badly planned protests, or a couple bad apples resulting in trouble for everyone. It's just been reported a bit more heavily the past 8 years or so because of the large amount of protests that were to be seen.
Problem # 1 in the US. Instead of fixing a problem, let's react.
Instead of instituting a decent healthcare system, and proper psychiatric treatment for what to me would appear to be a high functioning autistic, we should look at the record after the fact, and blame the student, not the system that failed to complete treatment, which could have easily prevented this, or the system that allowed him to buy the guns. blame the school for not looking at the background close enough. After all, anyone who's committed for any type of psychological issue shouldn't be allowed in a school since they might snap. And let's not even start on how Poe would likely compare to this guy.
Of course, a functioning system for expelling the student would have likely prevented this as well. If I've been hearing right, he got into quite a bit of trouble for things like stalking while at the school. Again, something that should have been in place already that would have prevented this. We don't need more snooping, we need less, and for the rules that are there to be FOLLOWED instead of glanced over. I'm quite sure the school had policy about harassment such as stalking, I wonder why that didn't get rid of him... likely because... he was money in the bank, and the risk was worth the cost.
I don't want to know why. I want my employees bonded by an outside company, or at the very least through an HR review. There are things you simply should not know when making the final decision. Yes, you should know the employee can be bonded, yes, you should know they passed the HR screening, yes you should know there are no felonies in the past X years, no, you should not know anything that could tell you about their political, religious, etc standing. And often enough, there is some correlation between a crime, and politics, or religion when the crime is one someone being truly impartial would be willing to overlook. No, you should not risk making a decisions based on one of those issues when you have two comparable candidates.
April 19, 2007 at 10:44 am
Kevin, we may be in agreement, in part. I don't mean to suggest nor imply that I personally as a hiring manager need to know anything but how competent the individual is for the job. It is the responsibility of the HR process to fully vet a candidate.
However, in US there are laws that prevent anyone having access to a persons medical history. It's protected by various laws such as HIPPIA and Sarbanes-Oxly, among others. Moreover, a person is deemed innocent until found guilty: therefore Mr. Hui had not had a trial and was considered innocent and allowed to purchase guns.
I agree that laws need to be enforced. But when they're not, a bit of snooping may be necessary.
I doubt the school was intrerested in his money. More likely, they were more interested in being politically correct. Most universities have very liberal policies, anything that may judge an individual, except of course, if its some one from the political right or a Christian, is overlooked. This university, like most others banned guns from their campus, even the police a prohibited from carrying guns. Evidently Mr Hui ignored that policy.
I'll bet that we'll be seeing more guns on campuses as well as more "snooping" into peoples backgrounds.
Equally, most companies ignore background checks so as not to offend someone or some group.
A sad paradox.
April 19, 2007 at 11:39 am
I think you need to ask yourself if a background check would have made any difference to this guy at all, or whether he would have respected laws that made it illegal for him to buy guns. People just need to pay attention to the others around them. In this day of Youtube and Myspace, we should be more aware of what other people are doing, but Youtube and Myspace are good examples of how we are more self-centered than we have ever been before. People never suspected Ted Bundy, Ted Kaczinsky, Terry Nichols, or this latest jerk. Why? Because we are too caught up in our own lives to pay attention to anyone else.
I am the kind of person who calls the cops when I see something strange going on, like a guy with way too many guns. Or a guy who walks around the neighborhood all day for no apparent reason (turns out he has a heart condition and his doctor told him to walk around a lot). The point is, I reported the strange activity, and it had a reasonable explanation, but that will not make me less likely to report strange things in the future. We need people to pay attention and take things seriously.
I follow the law because I am a law-abiding person, but people who intend to break the law in the first place, can get a gun if they want. The background check only makes it a pain in the butt for people like me who want to follow the law. It does give a little bit of accountability, because I know if my gun is ever used in a crime, the cops will be able to find me right away.
April 19, 2007 at 12:02 pm
In part, we are. in part, I think were reading into my sarcasm. Really, what we're missing is proper up front handling of people who fall into certain categories.
Instead of having strong grade school diagnosis of social disorders, most schools ignore problems and kids eventually end up getting treatment far too late, and then, when you attempt to get treatment, you're stalled at every step because mental health simply isn't a concern. My family is experiencing this first hand with our daughter who falls on the autistic spectrum. We see a lot of similarities between her, and this guy, and it scares us. Particularly since we really are struggling to get her the treatment she needs.
I will disagree with your assessment of universities however. Yes, most do have very liberal policies, but, in my experience, they are usually applied equally. However, offenses aren't necessarily equally reported depending what part of the country you're in. Keep in mind, the fringe of either side is more likely to do something to trigger a reaction. weather it involves a (usually humane) animal testing facility, or a overly attacked (mostly) medical/treatment facility. So, in the red states, there's more red fringe, and that causes more trouble, gets reported more, and stirs up the middle ground, in the blue areas, it actually tends to lean the other way.
and one last note on liberal school policies... when was the last time there was one of these massive school shootings outside of the south/Midwest?
However... I don't think wholesale snooping is EVER acceptable. this is the us, not communist Russia. this is the FBI, or employers, not the KGB. remember the cold war, when we fought against the evil empire that pried so heavily into it's populace's private business because the needed to quash the rebel sentiment before it got started? I'd hate to think that we won the cold war to end up really losing thanks to a couple bombs, and guns.
(OK, I need to stop ranting, I think I've used up my breaks for the day)
April 19, 2007 at 1:05 pm
I went for a drive and this got real clear in my head. Background checks are useless because they don't give any information about the person's current state of mind. In the two extremes, you have people with no criminal history, who flip out and commit a massacre in a public place, and the other extreme is the hardened criminal who's learned their lesson and is a much safer person now as a result of it. There are people with a criminal history and a likelihood of committing future crimes, but the correlation is not strong enough for us to be basing decisions on it, certainly not employment decisions. This latest issue is a good example... the guy had a criminal history, but it did not indicate that he was the type of person to kill anyone, much less a lot of random people. From his history, he seemed more likely to kill himself or rape somebody. The stuff he sent to NBC shows he is clearly disturbed and violent, but it is irrelevant to this discussion, because it came out after the crime, and nobody had access to it beforehand.
We need information that gives us some measure of a person's likelihood of committing a crime in the future, and background is not a good measure of that. Currently, we depend on criminal history to assess the likelihood of future criminal activity, and that's where we make the mistake. That data is not a dependable indicator, and yet we go around feeling safe around people with no criminal history, and fearing the ones who have it. Instead, we should fear everyone, and keep a closer eye on the people who haven't done anything yet.
As a society, I think we need to accept that some things simply can not be prevented. I think this latest issue falls into one of those categories. Certainly there are red flags that are obvious now that the person has committed a crime, but I don't think any of those things are particularly suspicious on their own. I know several people who own guns and like to take photos of them... all of them are people who I would trust with my life. Owning and being interested in guns is not a red flag, and by extension, posting photos of your hobby on the web isn't particularly scary either.
(I do not know what else this guy did which might have predicted this behavior, but I'm not particularly suspicious of people with a gun hobby, because I know people like that, and they are typically more responsible people than everyone else out there.)
April 19, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Here's a hypthetical Jasmine:
John Smith is a convicted pedophile. Spends 5 years in prison. Earns a degree in anything. Gets out and comes to your neighborhood and applies for a job as an elementary school teacher where YOUR children attend. He's paid his dues, shrinks have deemed him rehabilitated.
You give him the benefit of the doubt?
April 20, 2007 at 9:17 am
Should the same person become a burden on society because they cannot get a job working in a warehouse due to the criminal record, eventually disappear into homelessness, and become a bigger risk then a documented person on the offenders lists?
As much as it may freak you out, should the same person not be working on a computer in the back room of a company with no real contact with anyone other then coworkers?
That's one of the problems with the hiring manager doing the background check. Things that shouldn't be an impact on a hiring decision can color a choice. That's why I say either HR, or preferably an external entity should take a list of risks, and make the decision ignoring those things that aren't pertinent.
As much as I hate when my getting close to 20 years of experience gets ignored because I never finished a degree, I'm far more opposed to the prospect that someone more qualified might not get hired for a position because they got in a fender bender in the parking lot of a new age shop in a seedy part of town whereas someone else either has nothing, or had a fender bender in the hiring manager's church parking lot.
As someone doing the hiring, and needing to make decisions about who gets hired, and who doesn't, I've had more then one experience where someone revealed too much information, and I had to be very careful to not let that color my decision. There are a lot of people who simply can not do that, and a lot of them are managers. Thankfully, for me, there has always been a clear best candidate, and the people who reveal too much were either that candidate, and got hired, or one of the ones that was no where near what I was looking for to begin with, I'm not sure it would have been so easy to set aside knowing too much if faced with two equal candidates however.
April 20, 2007 at 10:03 am
It's far stretch ffrom a convicted pedophile to someone involved in a fender bender in anybody's parking lot.
But, lets agree to disagree.
Each of us will decide for ourselves who they want to work with and potentially expose to the rest of the "corporate family".
I'd rather err on the side of caution, as unfair as that may be.
April 20, 2007 at 11:57 am
John Smith is a convicted pedophile. Spends 5 years in prison. Earns a degree in anything. Gets out and comes to your neighborhood and applies for a job as an elementary school teacher where YOUR children attend. He's paid his dues, shrinks have deemed him rehabilitated.
You give him the benefit of the doubt?
People are missing the point here. There ARE appropriate background checks for people when related to the job. People who work with children would be subject to review for child offense issues but not perhaps for a reckless driving charge, but on the other hand a truck driver applicant would be appropriately checked for the driving offense.
For people who are working entirely with adults, and not driving vehicles, neither of those checks may really apply.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
April 20, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I have no problem with a potential employer doing a criminal backround check on me. I have HUGE problem if they run a credit check. I am not applying for a loan and it's none of their business if I have been late 3 times this year paying my VISA. My finances are none of their concern. Heck, I could have had my credit totally ruined due to Identity theft and I am working to clear it. It's none of their business, and I do not know the hiring manager, who is to say he doesn't steal my identity?
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