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If anybody doesn't think this is a problem, I overheard managers talking about a 3rd-party tool that finds "at risk employees" which they didn't define but said
by zug_zug 3y ago
If anybody doesn't think this is a problem, I overheard managers talking about a 3rd-party tool that finds "at risk employees" which they didn't define but said it included signals such as "they updated their linked in recently" as a signal that they may be on the job hunt.
You better believe that data brokers are both interested in buying and selling any sort of information around your employment/job/interview behaviors.
- shon 3y agoWe built this tool as part of HiringSolved. Other signals included time in current position relative to industry average and personal history.
- sli 3y agoI will never understand how people can willingly build tools like this that almost exclusively serve to make employment miserable.
- 8b16380d 3y agoThe family needs to eat and as an American with no social or economic safety net, my morals play a very small role.
- mistrial9 3y agothe industry in Silicon Valley and elsewhere is filled, packed with people who have no children
- dyingkneepad 3y agoLet me give you a hint how: it involves a money transaction.
- joseda-hg 3y agoThere's a strong component of "If I don't someone else will", but also, usually this is the kind of thing that sucks at getting general open/free solutions, because no one does it willingly, yet it's easy for an employer to justify paying for (And economically incentivize it's development)
- mrguyorama 3y ago"If I don't then someone else will" is only an excuse for the already morally dubious. So what if someone else does it? Sure the bad thing still exists, but at least you didn't personally make the world a worse place explicitly for your own personal gain. The unspoken part of that phrase is the second half of "so since it will happen anyway, it's not wrong for me to reap the rewards of doing the bad thing" I hope you understand how inherently wrong that is.
- xyzelement 3y agoI think there's an explanation that is both more charitable and more pragmatic. Companies try to keep employees happy and committed, and part of that is making sure they see a potential future / growth for themselves. As a manager I try to both make sure this is based in reality and that employees are picking up the message. I like to think I am good at this but it's a difficult skill, and external signal to "hey, you might want to check in with Bob a bit more carefully next time to make sure he's feeling as good as we think he is" could always be valuable. So even from Bob's perspective it's positive - he may get the extra conversation that increases his options where he stays. On the flip side, what's the malicious use case? "You updated your linkedIn so I am going to fire you" doesn't sound like company policy that's going to be implemented anywhere because it makes no sense.
- vineyardmike 3y ago> "You updated your linkedIn so I am going to fire you" You might be close to quitting (via perceived signal) so I’m going to give the high visibility project to someone “loyal”. You may be perceived as a quitter so I’m going to give discretionary budget for the next raise to the employee who is more loyal. You might be perceived as quitting, and my company requires me to stack rank employees. The lowest gets fired. I put you there to keep the rest of my team. You become a “sacrifice” since you were going to quit anyways. And these are just the examples my friends at Amazon talk about. I’m sure there’s more. Now consider all of the above, but now you’re on a visa. Losing your job means you have a few weeks to replace it or get deported.
- shon 3y agoTypically these tools are bought and used by HR or Talent Acq departments, not managers so the type of detailed decision-making you’re describing wasn’t a use-case in my experience. It’s more like a roll-up metric that can be looked at globally, by role, department, location, etc. yes, it can also be used at the individual level but again, HR is the buyer and they are the most fearfully bureaucratic department in most companies . From a data and capability perspective, I agree it’s a little scary. But in practice I doubt it’s used this way and if so, there’s your retention problem.
- shon 3y agoOriginally it was built as the inverse. A signal that recruiters could use to tell them which “passive candidates” could be more willing to change jobs. A customer asked if it could be used internally (we already had their ATS/HRIS data) so a new feature was born. Yes money was a motive but this particular feature didn’t seem like an evil idea to be used to increase employee misery. That said, We did build some things that I do regret now.
- westhanover 3y ago[flagged]
- 23B1 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive
- fHr 3y agoLate stage capitalism makes us do it.
- ggasdgasd 3y ago[flagged]
- latentcall 3y agoAmazing what people are willing to trade in exchange for a fat salary with decent benefits. Even if it means trading their moral code.
- shon 3y agoReally? You think this is that bad? I always said “at least we’re not building weapons we are trying to get people jobs (or keep them in jobs)” But aside from weapons, if you think building a retention tool for HR is bad, you certainly should not ever look at AdTech or the types of things insurance companies are doing from a data perspective. Or ah hem… Palatir for example.
- doktrin 3y ago> I always said “at least we’re not building weapons" If everyone in my country decided to stop working in or sponsoring the arms industry, we'd be invaded by an authoritarian dictatorship tomorrow. If in contrast we all summarily banned these aspiring social credit tools, the negative side effects would be negligible to nonexistent.
- blibble 3y agoso your argument is that you don't need to be ethical because there exist people that do worse things than you?
- shon 3y agoNo, my argument is that building an employee retention tool is not the same from an ethical perspective as building a weapon system. One is like a hammer, it was envisioned for and can be used for good, like building free houses for the poor. But it also makes a great bludgeon. The other is like building a weapon that is used as a weapon. And then there’s AdTech.. lol
- blibble 3y agoI'm sure zuckerberg says the same thing to his kids
- zettabomb 3y agoPaycheck go brrrr I assume
- ashton314 3y agoCan you tell us more? What signals should I be worried about employers looking at?
- shon 3y agoIt’s worse and deeper than you’d want to know. That said most HR Tech companies and large corporate HR departments are incompetent so it’s not really as scary in practice as it sounds. Also GDPR/CCPA has hamstrung a lot of this and HR depts are fairly petrified about it. Talent Acquisition, not so much…
- generalizations 3y agoWait, how much worse, and how much deeper? Unless that kind of stuff is a trade secret.
- shon 3y agoSorry, I’m being a little dramatic. I mean the data part is a little scary. Look up People Data Labs. There are lots of these data aggregators and that data can be used for a lot of scary things. HR in practice is probably the least scary.
- chaxor 3y agoI know many people who have been fired for _liking_ a post on Facebook. So there's that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- araes 3y agoYour website returns: Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN The certificate is only valid for the following names: *.allegisgroup.com, allegisgroup.com hiring solved
- shon 3y agoSold the company to Allegis.
- AndyMcConachie 3y agoDo you sleep well at night?
- shon 3y agoYes, actually. Hiring sucks. We wanted to make it better. I believe we did do that by showing the HR world that data driven insights could be a better indicator than what school someone went to or whether they played Ultimate Frisbee (a real hiring signal used by a Fortune 500 tech co). We didn’t solve hiring. It’s a tough problem with many strange human biases and rituals. But I do think we made it better even if only a little.
- pluc 3y agoIt can be useful to know who's near the door so that you may rectify the situation, it doesn't necessarily have to be slimy. Benefit of the doubt I guess. DX (getdx.com) has it and it's very pro-worker.
- iLoveOncall 3y agoThis can be a positive too, proactive dive & save to retain an employee who's manager feel they're about to leave isn't unheard of in my company. If you're good at your job and highly rated there should be obvious signs when they're trying to preemptively backfill you and at that point you can just communicate about how excited you are about your growth at the company or something to make them take a step back.
- tomrod 3y agoLet them squirm. Get your teammates to update to and keep management nervous and focused on improving the employee's lives. Take it even to starting a union if needed. You don't give your time to an employer, you trade it, and in our modern society we have a gap in the market power of labor. Only way to get it is to reclaim it.
- michaelt 3y ago> Let them squirm. The risk here isn't that your snooping boss feels a bit uncomfortable. The risk is that your snooping boss now thinks they'd better not send you on that expensive training course or assign you that big, important project where success could get you promoted. And that you'll never get a chance to address their fears, as they want to keep the snooping secret.
- javcasas 3y ago> success could get you promoted "Could" is such a big word. It means nothing, but it is intended to be very valuable. Get that promotion in writing. Otherwise it's a carrot to dangle upon you. > they'd better not send you on that expensive training course You know what's worse than training people and then these people leaving? Not training them and then these people staying. You insist on giving me reasons to stay away from that company.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoYou don't necessarily realize that you work for this company.
- justsid 3y agoSome people will talk about ideals all day without even realizing that they too live in the real world. So many things could be great, it’s just not the reality that we are in.
- HeavyStorm 3y ago
- nness 3y agoIt reminds of a concept, which barring a better name, is "action through inaction" — if you know an employee is unhappy through external signals like these, you could make the active effort to not engage with them knowing that it may lead them to quit; instead of a lengthy severance/redundancy discussion. I've seen similar insights, derived from a person's social-graph through email exchanges, and it was decided to not be used by managers as it could be a liability.
- throwaway918274 3y agoEmployers and recruiters are always bewildered when I say I don't have a LinkedIn account, or a public Github profile (I have a few tiny open source projects I maintain, but they are all pseudonymous) - and this is exactly why. I don't want people creeping any kind of "profile" of me. Ever.
- wvenable 3y agoI have such public accounts but they are specifically for said creeping.
- fHr 3y agoLinkedin is required to market yourself though or else you can't bullshit your way through the HR hoops.
- FpUser 3y agoNo. I have plenty of clients over the years and not a single on ever asked my LinkedIn and / or any other social. And if they ever will the answer will be NO. Well other than HN I am not really on social media anyways. Just have couple of accounts to talk to a couple of people.
- marssaxman 3y agoI deleted my LinkedIn account fifteen years ago, and it's been fine. I don't have random recruiters beating down my door trying to interest me in jobs I don't want, but is that such a loss? I've had no trouble getting the jobs I do want.
- behringer 3y agoMaybe you have a better history than I, but I've only ever had 2 or 3 very interested recruiters that got a hold of me but they were the real deal and weren't looking to fill entry level crap or stupid temp work. All the other recruiters just make chat and email spam easily ignored and they never bother me.
- 3y ago
- layer8 3y agoIf you can help it, it’s best to leave (or not start at) a company with such practices anyway.
- giantg2 3y agoThat's difficult to identify.
- layer8 3y agoWhat I mean is, you shouldn’t necessarily be afraid of losing your job or not getting hired due to those practices.
- giantg2 3y agoI already have concerns over my retention and marketability. I would definitely be concerned about this as I would like to have some sort of decent job.
- kelnos 3y agoI think a lot of people necessarily need to be afraid of losing their jobs, depending on their skill set, local job market (less important with remote work, but still), and financial situation.
- mianos 3y agoThe trouble is, often it can't be helped, management, and sometimes whole companies often change hands. In the firm I work at, so far I've survived 4 rounds of massive retrenchments over 3 years due to restructure and more recently a complete takeover. The only thing in my control is to leave, yes.
- tonmoy 3y agoPerfect, I can update my LinkedIn profile when the project is in a critical phase and I know managers are making increment decisions
- _8j50 3y agoI think this was done to me. I didn't even signin or anything, just looked around at what options are out there and started getting questions about my plans to leave. What I've learned is if you plan to change jobs assume everyone at your current job will find out the minute you have an interview booked. Only applies to big companies that pay 3rd parties to monitor their employees like that though. Sometimes I wish we had germany's privacy laws for employees in the US.
- duxup 3y agoEven some rudimentary effort on a given manager's part could find LinkedIn updates. I'm not convinced this is always an ultimately bad outcome if someone finds that.
- Avicebron 3y agoI feel like if managers are using third party tools to try and find employees changing their linkedin,, they have waaay too little to do
- mmcdermott 3y agoVery few managers would do this themselves. It is far more likely to be done by HR or an HR-adjacent group and a report sent to a manager.
- bri3d 3y agoI've never really seen retention risk tooling used for evil in the way that most HN readers seem to think it is; it's kind of interesting and eye-opening to me to see the strong negative sentiment towards it. I've worked in management at companies with risk-based retention tools, and I've always seen them used as just that... retention tools. If anything, getting a high risk score as a high performer would usually be greatly in an employee's best interest, as it would be another justification to the higher-ups for a raise or better job assignment. To be clear, I'm personally generally against these kind of panopticon data-slurp initiatives overall, I'm just surprised that the initial reaction is so strongly "my manager will use this to fire me" when I've only ever seen the opposite.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoI've never even heard of these tools before now, but my impression is the same as yours: the people they flag are more likely to be the kind of people that you want to keep.
- t_mann 3y agoThe basic assumption at play here is that data about you that you don't control is likely going to end up being used against you, which I think isn't unreasonable. Flawed risk metrics, even if they are only used to benefit those who are flagged, may still turn out to be unfavorable for some employees (eg for the false negatives).
- zug_zug 3y agoWell the article is about glassdoor, which is where you write reviews. You better believe that if databrokers will buy information on whether you updated linked in that they'd also buy information on whether you gave the company a 1 star review. Heck, you can even post your salary to glassdoor, so maybe your next employer would buy that information so they know the least they could offer you.
- nuancebydefault 3y ago>"my manager will use this to fire me" For me it is more like: "my manager sees that I'm looking for a job", and I really rather tell him that I will be leaving, as soon as I'm certain of a new job. It's none of his business before that point.
- jstarfish 3y ago[dead]
- behringer 3y agoI hope my boss sees my LinkedIn activity. Every other company does and if they want to retain me they better be willing to offer a fair wage.
- Gibbon1 3y agoI think we should modify the laws covering credit reporting agencies to cover these knuckleheads and add criminal penalties for non compliance.
- escapedmoose 3y agoI once got a call from HR because I had updated my LinkedIn profile and they wanted to know if I was considering leaving.