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I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand the situation it's illegal to take certain types of information into account when making hiring decisions (e.g. race, gend

by seldo 12y ago

I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand the situation it's illegal to take certain types of information into account when making hiring decisions (e.g. race, gender, religion I think, sexuality in some states, etc.). It's not illegal to go looking for more information about a candidate, but if in the course of doing so you also find information in those protected categories, it would be illegal to use that information. The act of finding it out is not itself illegal. The morality of doing so on a network not intended for professional purposes -- like Facebook, say -- is questionable. I don't do that. All that said, a LinkedIn profile specifically is obviously intended for public information, so finding it and reading it seems morally 100% okay in my book, and I do this all the time. I also google applicants to find their Github profiles if they haven't supplied them, and that seems fair to me too.

curun1r 12y ago
> I also google applicants to find their Github profiles if they haven't supplied them, and that seems fair to me too. We've done somewhat the reverse...we had a script that would use the GitHub API to find projects using certain technologies, measure them according to certain metrics (test coverage, LoC, etc) and resolve them to GitHub profiles which were filtered for location and then reviewed manually. The ones that passed we resolved to LI profiles and contacted about our open positions. It worked well and almost completely eliminated any discrimination along any protected class. Then again, we may have been violating the GitHub ToS, so a lawyer probably would have dinged us on that. Still, it was such an effective recruiting technique that it may be worth it. And reviewing code in GitHub is so much more enjoyable (and informative) than sifting through resumes.
jborden13 12y ago
> I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand the situation it's illegal to take certain types of information into account when making hiring decisions (e.g. race, gender, religion I think, sexuality in some states, etc.). I'm appalled that you are somebody that hires for a living and you don't know the basic legalities of your profession.
mark-r 12y ago
My name is already registered at Github by someone else, and it's not a common name at all. I just hope they're good!

by seldo 12y ago

curun1r 12y ago

> I also google applicants to find their Github profiles if they haven't supplied them, and that seems fair to me too. We've done somewhat the reverse...we had a script that would use the GitHub API to find projects using certain technologies, measure them according to certain metrics (test coverage, LoC, etc) and resolve them to GitHub profiles which were filtered for location and then reviewed manually. The ones that passed we resolved to LI profiles and contacted about our open positions. It worked well and almost completely eliminated any discrimination along any protected class. Then again, we may have been violating the GitHub ToS, so a lawyer probably would have dinged us on that. Still, it was such an effective recruiting technique that it may be worth it. And reviewing code in GitHub is so much more enjoyable (and informative) than sifting through resumes.

jborden13 12y ago

> I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand the situation it's illegal to take certain types of information into account when making hiring decisions (e.g. race, gender, religion I think, sexuality in some states, etc.). I'm appalled that you are somebody that hires for a living and you don't know the basic legalities of your profession.

mark-r 12y ago

My name is already registered at Github by someone else, and it's not a common name at all. I just hope they're good!