On The Internet, If It Looks, Quacks and Walks Like a Duck, Is It *REALLY* a Duck?
I am a great believer of performing due diligence to ensure potential new hires have no deceptive or malicious skeletons in their past that may be reincarnated after they have been hired and entrusted with access to sensitive information and supporting resources. There are appropriate times organizations should do criminal background checks, education checks, and other checks as appropriate and legal for the position being filled and the location of the facility.
However, there should be care taken when making hiring and firing judgments based upon what is found on the Internet. Facebook, YouTube, personal web pages and blogs, and a vast number of other sites are now being routinely checked and used as a basis for making hiring decisions, and when looking for information about current employees.
What should you do if you find an unflattering or seemingly inappropriate photo of one of your employees on the Internet? Would it matter if it was posted by someone else? Would it matter if it was taken while the person was outside of the work environment? Would you fire him or her if it appeared it was inappropriate? Would you deny someone a college degree because of a silly photo? Would you not hire someone because of something bad that was said about the person by someone else?
Keep in mind photos can be doctored quite dramatically, and that gossip often spreads quickly on the Internet passing as fact.
I discuss the issues regarding the use and trustworthiness of online information about organizations and their employees in my monthly column I wrote for the June issue of the CSI Alert newsletter, "On The Internet, If It Looks, Quacks and Walks Like a Duck, Is It REALLY a Duck?"
You can see my final, pre-production, draft at my site.
I welcome your feedback!
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Comments
That's an interesting topic, indeed. Part of life is having inappropriate moments, quite honestly, and sometimes things on the Internet are certainly not what they seem.
I tend to blur the work-play-life lines quite a bit, but even I don't keep them so blurry as to not have any inappropriateness in my life outside work. I would hate to have to walk on eggshells or compromise who I am in my private time just to satisfy the powers that be in my work time.
Some people argue that the Internet is deluding and degrading our morals, but in a way, it is also making us hyper-sensitive about them too. In the past, finding inappropriate things took time and effort (or dumb luck), but the Internet makes that information dangerously efficient.
Posted by: LonerVamp | June 22, 2007 2:17 PM
Yes, in fact it is important to be able to let your hair down and blow off steam in your private life, especially if you work in a highly structured and limited workplace where you must walkd on eggshells throughout the workday.
It is one thing to be in public and have surveillance cameras capture our activities, but to be in your own home, hotel, friend's house, or whatever, and potentially have a photo or video clip taken and posted online, to then be the cause of work decisions or terminations, or worse, really does not only blur the lines between work and private life, it actually integrates and connects them in ways never before done.
Isn't it interesting that once people were afraid the government would become a Big Brother monitoring our every move, but in reality technology in the hands of people we know, and even strangers, has become Big Brother by how much is posted online without our knowledge.
It would be interesting to do a bit of research to see how many of the viral online videos were made without the subjects' knowledge...I can think of several that were made of politicians...
Posted by: Rebecca | June 25, 2007 4:33 PM