Read what I posted again. My decision (hypothetically, mind you) to ignore their application had nothing to do with intoxication. It had to do with their inability to maintain a public profile. I've made this quite clear. You can PM me if necessary. A DUI and a keg stand are not one and the same. One is an illegal and morally heinous act. The other is private behavior that I don't attach any moral approbation to. That one is lack of clarity on my part. By "should," I mean whether it is ethical or not. What I mean is I'm not saying anything about whether the employer is acting morally. Again, since I'm not evaluating the morality of the act, I don't know what line you are referring to. Ethically? I'm not sure. I'm inclined to say that hiring a PI is unethical, but that's quite separate from the point I've been making. I'll answer this either by edit or in a second post in a moment.
Actually, in my state, it's discriminatory practice to deny someone employment based on past criminal convictions, or by finding a lack of "good moral character". It happens all the time because it's next to impossible to prove, but that doesn't make it legal. The question isn't whether employers should or should not account for the products of our online presence when considering us for employment. The reality of the matter is that they do, and will continue to do so regardless of whatever future legislative action might be taken on behalf of employees, simply because they can without being penalized. They might not be able to openly fire you or deny you employment for what they see on your Facebook page, but there are a million ways to get rid of someone if the boss has decided they don't meet the company's standards. I see no practical means of preventing this beyond voluntary self-censorship.
There's a huge unanswered question of what the employer should be allowed to have access to in order to form their decision, and that is the really grey area. As an employer, I'll be more than happy to use anything that is publicly available. I can also ascribe any weight or value to the information depending on the role that the job plays in MY company. If you smack your girlfriend in front of me at a bar we happen to attend together (coincidentally), yep, I'm going to use that to fire your ass or not hire you, regardless. If I walk by a BBQ and you're doing a keg-stand in the back yard (visible to the public), then yep, that's going to be used, and I won't put up with any "I feel sick" shit from you. If I stumble upon a facebook photo of you doing lines off of a dead hooker, yep, I'm going to use that too. If I did a credit check, or a criminal check, then I'd use those results as well. My philosophy (right or wrong) is that you're free to do whatever you want, and post whatever the hell you want, but I'm then free to look for and find that stuff and use it in my decision-making. And I don't really give a fuck about the legality, because I'm the small-business owner that has the mentality that it's MY prerogative to employ you, I can make whatever arbitrary decision I want when it comes to your employment, and I don't owe you shit. Certain demonstrated behaviours are not acceptable to me, and will result in you not being hired, or you being summarily fired. Others represent the need for caution and could pose a risk if those behaviours get out of hand. In the end, I hire the person, not the resume.
As for the DUI, VI, I consider this to be an entirely different beast than curse words, questionable photos, or tasteless jokes on a Facebook profile. For the most part, the latter are at least morally ambiguous. Few people (and certainly not you nor I) would consider use of the word fuck or a photo with a beer in hand to be of much moment. A DUI though? That's entirely different. First of all, the above are mostly in the realm of the indiscreet. A DUI is criminal. A DUI endangers the lives of others. Driving drunk is nearly universally regarded as morally heinous in modern American society. A DUI usually says a lot about a person. Are there gray areas (the guy who blows a 0.081, for example?) Yes. That's part of why cover letters exist. To explain yourself. If you get a DUI, you have a hell of a lot to explain for. Someone who has a DUI on his or her record has lost the benefit of the doubt. It's up to them to prove themselves responsible. I think we will just disagree on this one, but a DUI is an offense of such magnitude that it is fair to assume that the person is generally irresponsible until proven otherwise. This is getting sort of tangential to the original question, though.
Oh, and just to be clear, I'm coming from a place where I've been the entrepreneur who is paying for staff out of my own pocket, while my wife and I go without, for years. If you want to get paid, then you earn it, on MY terms. And it's not some HR dweeb cutting you a cheque, it's me, and therefore I get to say what/where I spend my cash on. I really do believe that the hiring/firing practices for large and small businesses should be different, as the small business can die as a result of a single bad employee and the potential legal shit from that whole "you owe me" mentality.
Here, I might disagree. I think a large business can be taken down by one bad apple as well. How we view the workplace, and how workplaces run, has become a very interesting, yet complex, question. With the amount of regulation (in the US anyway) that all businesses are subject to, I'm not sure how constrained people are in hiring, outside of Equal Opportunity Employment laws, but I may take a look into it for my own edification. I do know this teacher is an interesting example of what we are discussing currently. She was fired because of her facebook page - showing she was holding alcoholic beverages while on vacation.
See, that is absolute crap, in my opinion. Too many people with too much time on their hands trying to validate their position and cover their own ass taking shit too far. Personally, I would tend to NOT hire someone who DIDN'T drink or swear. I'm currently under contract at [name redacted], and the HR bullshit that is going on is absolutely amazing. There is an "academic" guy who was hired to do a job, and with 2 PhD's, and a glowing resume, you'd think he was perfect. Except he's now shown himself to be a social outcast... can't relate with the rest of the team, doesn't interact socially, etc. I tried to fire him after a couple of weeks, once it became apparent that he wasn't going to be able to do the job, and because he was having a negative affect on the team's morale (which is a HUGE problem in such a high-stress environment). HR came back and said, "no, we're not allowed... we'll have to let his 4 month contract run its course". This, even though he misrepresented himself in the interviews and has stated he cannot meet the deliverables agreed to in his contract.
Really? How? Most of the people I work with are bad apples. A good majority of them talk shit about the company I work for, dog-fuck the day away and make more issues than they solve in most cases. How would that help a small business in any sense? It's two different worlds. Small businesses depend on their employees to be productive and support their company. In the big business world, depending on what you do for the company, it doesn't really matter. Point in case; I've known people who work for the company I work with that have gone over a week without doing anything productive. They get drunk on their time off, show up hung over and managed to code/hide all their time in the massive paperwork stacks that no-one will ever look at. Edit: I work for a company with 14,000+ employees.
I guess my response would be contained in your post. If these folks do nothing, why are they being retained? Based on your post, they do nothing, which means the company is losing money, because it's paying for this deadweight. Who knows, maybe that dead weight may well cost your company the ability to expand, or even worse, since they're unproductive, perhaps not be able to have enough accounts receivables to cover debt service, or the like. I still think one bad employee can take down an entire company. Are there companies that absorb lots of bad employees but still stay in business? Sure, I deal with one all the time, and you may have heard of it, it's called 'The State of New Jersey.' Talk about waste. No wonder it's in debt all the time. I'll look for an example of one bad employee taking down a large company, but I can't think of one off the top of my head. Edit: I'll pm you anything further, Primer, as this is a bit far afield, I believe.
You know, we have too many fucking idiots running the show that have an overwhelming need/desire to validate their existence and exert their apparent authority. Common sense just ain't so common any more, and people have become complacent, easily offended pussies. Political correctness has fucked up way more stuff than it's ever solved. Overdeveloped senses of self-entitlement are everywhere. And people have lost the concept of taking responsibility for their actions and respecting their fellow man. Might not be on topic, but I can bet that a number of those rants can explain a lot of the shit that we're talking about in this thread.
Truthfully, it's REALLY hard to say that any large company could be brought down by a single employee, never mind it's hard to call a CEO/etc an "employee". Sure, there's Darl McBride of SCO, Ken Lay, etc., but if you take a closer look you'll find that while they might be the public figurehead or scapegoat, it was really the actions of many that collaborated to bring down the companies. But if you're a small business, with a handful of employees, and not making huge profits, a single bad, or even under performing employee could have a huge impact on the viability and health of the company. For instance, one erroneous statement made by an employee, acting as an agent of the company, could doom that company. I've seen it happen. A sales guy said "we can build X for Y dollars", when he wasn't authorized to do so, and it wasn't even going to cover costs. But he overstepped his bounds, and promised it to the client, and the lawsuits started flying. Company spent $100k defending itself, and cash flow dried up, and so did the company. They won, by the way, but it was too late, the damage was done. Large companies have the cash reserves and on-staff resources to handle things like hiring lawsuits, etc. Small companies don't. Merely defending a malicious or untrue claim could kill a small company, even if they were found to be 100% in the right.
I'm not sure if I have an opinion as to whether it's right or wrong, but I think you're stupid if you think you can post anything you want on your Facebook page without repercussion. As it relates to the background checks/hiring/firing, I guess I kind of put this in the category of "dress for the job you want, not for the job you have". And if you don't get the job, well, maybe somebody thought you didn't take the opportunity seriously. Of all the 22-to-28-ish year olds that I've interviewed or hired over the past several years, I automatically assumed that they were raging drunken dickheads. It's how I was, and sometimes, how I still am. I tend to relate to people who party and socialize, although I don't hold it against you if you don't. 8 out of 10 times, if I checked your Facebook or Myspace page, there was probably something there that you didn't want me to see. As far as I'm concerned, however, you get a free pass for being young and stupid. I think the problem is that a lot of people don't realize that you only get a "young and stupid" pass while you're still actually young. At some point in your career, things start taking shape, and you have to be responsible for who you are and what you represent as an employee. I moved up the career ladder at a pretty young age. I was made a VP and officer at my last job before I turned 30. I still had a Myspace page. I still had Facebook. And I still acted young and stupid. That is until one of my clients Facebooked me. He was a pretty choice guy, and we got along great, but it was a pretty big wakeup call that not only was I representing myself on those pages, but also my globally-recognized company. What if my client hadn't been so understanding? What if he had emailed my boss to tell him that he thought I was wholly under-qualified to be handling billion dollar deals? I haven't used Myspace of Facebook for a couple of years. I still party. I still enjoy a little debauchery here and there. I just don't rejoice about it in open forum (well, unless you consider this to be open forum).
This brings up another point that I know I addressed last time we discussed this topic (now lost to the firestorm of IHTSBIH's failure). We will know the people we interact with in much more intimate ways than at any point before. The sanitized, white washed concept of "professionalism" (in itself a fairly new idea popularized by corporations' and their realization that while no business owner would ever compromise themselves for a marginal profit, you can easily force your employees to do it) is dying. In world where it is becoming increasingly impossible to hide who you are, our society at large will have to start accepting people for who they are. Right now the situation is that we have a lot of old folks whose sins have been lost to the alzheimer's ravaged memories of those who were there, freely judging a younger generation whom the digital camera and the internet has made much more vulnerable to such judgments. As this older generation dies off (or simply realizes the hypocrisy in judging others whilst cheating on your wife in a relationship with your secretary that is likely coercive), we'll enter a period when everyone's dirt is out in the open, and as a result people will be forced to be both more pragmatic about what they can expect out of a fellow human being, and more compassionate in the sense that they are less willing to condemn others knowing how easily the situation could be flipped.
You presume they have the capacity for that degree of self-reflection and self-correction. I shook the Magic 8 Ball on that one. "All signs point to you being royally fucked until they die"
I can wait, I'm hale as a mother fucker. And yes this entire response is simply a flimsy pretext to use the word "hale."
I'll need to see proof that our parents didn't birth our entire generation so they could transplant their fucked up brains into fresh bodies using technology we'll eventually invent for them. That's why they're so pissed about World of Warcraft and Facebook. We're ruining the healthy bodies they planned to use for endless drum circles and hash parties in the meadow with Sandpumpkin and Herbchild.
This would be true if people actually showed there real selves on facebook, but it almost never is completely like that: http://www.cracked.com/article_15231_7-reasons-21st-century-making-you-miserable.html This article was posted before and it addresses the type of people we create for ourselves: it's not who we really are; it's what we want people to think we are like. This happens with everything from pictures to your personal interests. And sometimes, it really is out of our control. Lots of people tend to judge the type of person you are based on pictures alone. For me, I only happen to have pictures of yourselves at parties taken by female acquaintances because I don't need a god damn camera to show to the world every I go. Pictures of me just hanging out with the guys almost never make it to facebook.
If you're the kind of person who feels compelled to lie about yourself on the Internet to salvage your ego, or create an alternate identity to stave off self-loathing (and that includes only posting pictures of yourself next to women at parties), then you're probably transparently miserable and disingenuous in real life. Any employer worth working for wouldn't need to check your Facebook profile to figure that out pretty quickly.
This response gets away from the heated debate but no one here has mentioned how dangerous social networking sites are as virus "superspreaders." I wrote a speech on this topic last semester for a writing class and was shocked when I found out how useful these sites are as mediums for spreading viruses. The interconnectivity between users, the constantly updated statuses, people's addiction to checking the site 8 to 10 times a day: facebook is a data aggregator that can spread viruses faster than anything we've seen before. The Black hat conference in 2008 called as much and we have seen myspace become a playground for hackers; the knowledgeable predict Facebook will be next. Facebook's recent initiatives to add applications and other 3rd-party programs has worsened the problem. Young people log on to talk to their friends and look at last week's frat photos. What could be more inane? Their feeling of comfort and security is antithetical to protecting oneself on the web because people don't view these 3rd party apps as 3rd party apps, they are just extensions of facebook, which is a company which cares about them and provides this great service. Anyone seen the 6 degrees of separation facebook group? It basically uses a mathematical law to show that through six connections you can link any two people in the world. This is why Facebook and sites like it will be the next platform for computer viruses. The Koobface32 virus is a famous example of taking advantage of the interconnectedness of Facebook. Identity theft and loss of privacy is scary, but the dangers become a lot more pronounced and real when you consider a burglar scouting your holiday plans on facebook to time his break-in. And if the viruses and burglars don't fuck you, Facebook will: In November 2007, Facebook introduced a script called Beacon. Beacon is a program that third-party websites can use to send information to Facebook about its users and what they do on the third-party site. For instance, an online clothing site might use Beacon to report to Facebook the type and quantity of purchases the user made. Similarly, gaming sites can record users’ entertainment predilections, and all sites take note of which ads the users click on. The introduction of Beacon caused a serious controversy in the Facebook community, resulting in the option for users to opt out of the program. However, this opt out only prevents Facebook from publishing this information in your news feed; it does not prohibit Facebook from using the information Beacon collects to make you a target for advertising and junk mail. Facebook was using Beacon to make money on your information. I have no idea whether they still do. I am no tech expert and the research I did on this topic was obviously not exhaustive. Someone else here could probably speak on whether this is a real worry. However, I know enough about how viruses spread to realize how perfect Facebook is for it and I care enough about my privacy not to take chances. I want to be a lawyer and a collection of photos of me getting hammered is the last thing I want employers to see. I miss the utility of social networking sites and my social life has probably suffered a little (girls seem weirded out when you don't have a facebook and you're in college) but I like sleeping more soundly.