Applicant screening

Filed in archive Bootstrapper Tools on March 15, 2010

Picking good employees is a pre-requisite for growing a successful startup, and everyone has their own formula for picking winners. Does yours include Internet screening?

Getting Googled as a precondition for employment (or a date, for that matter) is old hat. Embarrassing photos on Facebook tanking the prospective investment banking careers of drunken frat boys isn't news. The latest speculation, though, is over whether or not new location-based tracking services like Foursquare and Gowalla will be the latest resource for companies to check and potentially use against applicants.

I don't have a problem with organizations that do this sort of screening, or any other sort, really; applicants are free to apply or not apply anywhere they want based on whatever information they can uncover about those jobs or businesses, companies should have the same sort of discretion. The protections in place for employees after they are hired are fairly strong, so the time and place to protect the business is before making the hire.

Whether or not it's actually a worthwhile effort that can tell you, as the hiring party, anything useful, is another question. Are you discriminating against applicants with unusual names? I use a full range of these services, but good luck trying to find me among the cloud of other folks or the Scottish engineering firm with the same name. And so what if your applicant was at a strip club at one AM on a Sunday morning? Maybe they were picking up a drunk friend. There's just a limited number of things you can infer from the information you actually might find.