Hold That Password: The New Reality of Evaluating Job Applicants

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The news that some employers have asked for direct access to the Facebook accounts — including user names and passwords — of people applying for jobs at their firms has set off a firestorm of controversy. The reports have raised questions about whether the practice is illegal and if such a policy could expose those employers to potential discrimination lawsuits. The dust-up has even triggered calls by some in Congress for a federal investigation into the practice.

But those recent events only highlight a new reality: the identity that individuals create in the world of social media is quickly becoming an important factor in hiring decisions and in people’s broader professional lives. “The questions around employer access to social network logins reflect a broader debate in society about a host of digital privacy issues,” says Andrea Matwyshyn, a Wharton professor of legal studies and business ethics. “This is a new concern — the degree to which employers can gain access to all role identities through one virtual space. There is no parallel to that in the real world.”

While the reaction to the practice has been swift and intense, it’s hard to predict if it will become a lasting trend. But Matwyshyn says she began hearing about employers requesting access to the Facebook accounts of potential hires as far back as 2008. To date, however, she notes that there is no good data on how widespread the practice has become. But the fact that it exists at all is not entirely unexpected: According to Matwyshyn, a number of studies show that most employers look at candidates’ online profiles when making hiring decisions. Case in point: A 2011 survey by social media monitoring service Reppler found that 91% of recruiters reported using social networking sites to evaluate job applicants.

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But checking out a publicly available profile on Facebook — or even asking a job candidate to “friend” someone in human resources at a company where they are applying for a position — is worlds apart from gaining unfettered access to someone’s account through a password. “If you can take Facebook passwords, what about Gmail passwords?” asks Stuart Soffer, a non-residential fellow at The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and managing director of IPriori, an intellectual property consulting firm. If left unchecked, Soffer notes, the practice could expand beyond human resources departments evaluating potential employees. “What about allowing Facebook access to insurers so they can see what you are saying about your health?” he notes. “They could use it as a basis for judging the risk of insuring you.”

The request for access to login information, however, raises serious legal questions. For one thing, Facebook has stated that sharing or soliciting a Facebook password is a violation of the company’s statement of rights and responsibilities. Matwyshyn says that means employers could be essentially asking job candidates to violate their contract with Facebook, creating “an untenable conflict between contract law and employers’ perceptions of their own interest in vetting candidates.”

In addition, if a Facebook account includes information on an applicant’s race or age, for example, that could potentially expose the employer to claims of discriminatory hiring practices. According to Matwyshyn, it is legally hazy whether accessing someone’s Facebook account where that information is available is akin to asking it in the interview. “Arguments can be made that this is a back-door method to gaining information that the prospective employer wouldn’t otherwise have access to,” she says.

Clearly concerned about the legal and business implications of privacy breaches, Facebook has come out against the practice. “We don’t think employers should be asking prospective employees to provide their passwords because we don’t think it’s the right thing to do,” Facebook chief privacy officer Erin Egan said in a statement. “But it also may cause problems for the employers that they are not anticipating.”

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Meanwhile, the issue is getting the attention of Congress. Senate Democrats Charles Schumer and Richard Blumenthal, from New York and Connecticut respectively, have asked the Justice Department and the Equal Opportunity Commission to look into the practice. But even if it is eventually prohibited or otherwise curbed through legal or legislative channels, Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard predicts that the use of social media in hiring decisions will continue to be a flashpoint in the years ahead. “The core of the problem is the blending of personal and professional lives,” Rothbard says. “We are still in the infancy of trying to understand how to deal with all this.”

Opening the Window — and Closing a Door?

Just how far employers can legally go to check out job candidates online may not be clear — but why they are looking for new methods of evaluating applicants is easy to understand, notes Wharton management professor Adam Grant. He says research has shown that the typical job interview is a poor tool for predicting which candidates will succeed. If that does not work, companies need to find something that does. “Applicants are very motivated to put their best foot forward in an interview,” Grant notes. “It is very difficult to spot the people who will represent an organization well. But on Facebook, you can see the applicant making day-to-day decisions — it is a window into how an individual is likely to act.”

In fact, recent research has provided evidence that online profiles can be very revealing about specific personality traits. A paper published recently in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology titled, “Social Networking Websites, Personality Ratings, and the Organizational Context: More Than Meets the Eye,” studied 518 undergraduate students and their Facebook profiles. The researchers found that the Facebook profiles were a good predictor of the so-called “big five personality traits”: conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, emotional stability and openness. And for a subset of the group where the researchers were able to contact supervisors at companies that had hired those students, there was a correlation between scores on two personality traits — emotional stability and agreeableness — and job performance.

“There is strong evidence that social networking is a valid way of assessing someone’s personality,” says Donald Kluemper, a professor of management at the Northern Illinois University College of Business and a co-author of the study. But he says that does not mean there is evidence that an unstructured perusal of a Facebook account will result in better hiring decisions. “Until a method is validated in a number of ways, including a study of adverse impacts and the legal issues, I wouldn’t recommend companies rely on social networking profiles,” Kluemper states.

Right now, the use of social media information is far from fine-tuned, with recruiters typically checking out social media sites to get a general sense of the person applying for a job or to hunt for any red flags. But it is possible the use of that information could become more sophisticated. “People are mining that data right now for other purposes, including targeting ads to the right people,” says Shawndra Hill, a Wharton operations and information management professor. “It is not out of the realm of possibility to focus that on other outcomes, like how good a match someone is for a job or whether there is a high likelihood they might do something illegal.”

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