Dirt-Digging When Hiring Employees: Why You Shouldn't Do It
Unrealistic expectations, their limitations, and the dangers they promise
Posted Jul 28, 08:12 am in branding, business, economics, experiences, human nature, human resources, marketing, social networking
The New Reality
I wonder if there are going to be any viable candidates for anything in the future. The accessibility of information on the internet as well as the general ease for one to post information to it, especially at a young age, has led few curious and tech-savvy individuals from the internet generation to have clean, unsearchable online slates. If you’ve observed the behavior of 8-25 year olds recently, I think you will make the reasonable assumption that people of this age group comprise the lion’s share of Facebook’s 36 million users, and MySpace’s 73 million users, and have made their mark online in many other arenas.
And what kind of comments are these people posting on the internet, that would reassure potential employers of this person’s quality? Here’s one from a person I’ll call Ashley Pinsky, 15, from MySpace.
OMG i was so fukced up last nite lol!!!
Granted, this is an extreme example, but not an uncommon one. That offhand comment will probably prevent Ms. Pinsky from ever becoming president. And the nature of the internet is such that this comment may not be easy to find in the future, but it’s never going away. Someone who wanted to find dirt on Ashley Pinsky will find that comment 35 years later, no doubt. It’s not like it was in the good old days, where your exploits and comments could be geographically contained, or confined to the memory of a couple people who overheard your off-color joke in the privacy of your living room. We live in a world of YouTube, digital cameras, hidden recorders, live microphones, and ill-considered internet confessions.
The Problem with Vividness
But in the wise and out-of-context words of Marge Simpson, as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be served. Right? Right?
Wrong.
One of the big concerns we should have is our tendency towards misleading vividness. The following is an example, and one that is intended intended as a convenient analogy, not a political screed.
Think about the difference between the respective presidential bids of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in particular the controversies. We only criticized George Bush for his long history of alcohol abuse and coke-snorting, but we skewered Barack Obama for attending a church that appeared to deliver hateful sermons. Aside from the respective gravity of these apparent violations of character (the weight of them essentially created by the media), there’s one thing that separates them significantly: one was documented on camera and the other was not. We could watch Jeremiah Wright on endless loop, in vivid detail, cementing our impressions of his “hateful” church and its link to Obama.
The Wright tape was so visceral and immediate that it was hard for it to not make an impression somehow— even though it literally represented 2 minutes of the church’s decades-long history, and there was no further proof of similar activity. But all we heard about Bush’s years, possibly decades of hard partying and drug abuse was that he was reputed to be a former cokehead and alcoholic. We had didn’t have 2 minutes of videotape showing Bush snorting lines or stumbling around drunk or emotionally damaging his loved ones. For that, Bush didn’t have to own up to anything, while Obama had to do a lot of dancing around. Due to the vividness, the Wright issue seemed much more real and immediate than the other, so we pressed it much more, and it played a much larger role in our mental construction of Obama’s character.1
My point is not to get into whether these controversies themselves are important to examine in a presidential candidate; instead, I want to explore the economics of hiring techniques which involve the use of vividness and “dirt-digging” to establish character, and the lack of foresight that companies and our electorate may be unwittingly entering into by engaging in such practices that forcibly marry vividness with significance.
No One is Who They Appear to Be at Any Given Time
Our immediate instinct is to say when we find dirt on someone online, or in photographs, or in videos that we use these occurrences as evidence, testimonials to someone’s personality. Did you see that photo of him drunk at a bar? He’s a loose cannon. We can’t possibly trust him with our industrial equipment, or have our clients find out that (outside of work) he behaves in an unprofessional manner.
The problem is that we ascribe too much meaning to these words and images when they come from an unprofessional environment. First of all, it should not come to a surprise to anyone that people behave unprofessionally when they’re not at work. To expect that they don’t is an unrealistic and fairly ridiculous expectation that, when you think about it, demands far too much of someone who is only human. People are not their jobs. They behave themselves at work because they have to. At home and in their leisure time, they feel like they should be able to let loose and be themselves. After all, why should they be evaluated on behavior that does not directly and demonstrably affect the quality of their work?2
This leads me to wonder whether our apparent demands for a sparkling personal history is the result of us actually wanting to hire “clean” individuals for reasons of productivity or wanting to hire individuals who can at least appear clean so as to not horrify outsiders. The difference is that the latter acknowledges the imperfection of humans and settles for someone who can keep his indiscretions private, while the other wants us to be held to unmanageably high standards all the time.
In fact, I doubt seriously that there are completely clean people in this country, or the world. It’s just that much of our ‘dirty’ behavior occurs without documentation. I’m sure that if we all were being filmed all the time for everyone to see, there would be no one out there without some unsavory event connected to their name. If it wasn’t some frowned-upon activity like drug or alcohol use, it would be something else like violence, sexual indiscretion, off-color conversations and asides, shady business dealings, rude behavior, subtle racism, or anger management issues. And it’s not like these people are bad people; we’re talking about isolated moments that would appear damning if documented and replayed— moments that actually permeate all of our lives constantly.
Indeed, what man or woman would not appear foolish, controversial, unreasonable, or perverted if monitored 24/7 and edited to exaggerate the most sensational segments of his day (which is essentially what so-called HR background checks do)? Producers of reality television shows know this. They know how to work Final Cut Pro to make a normal girl seem like a raving bitch, a decent guy into an aggressive, misogynistic hothead, and a neurotic, socially-maladjusted lunatic into Simon Cowell.
Presidential candidates aren’t allowed the normal lapses of speech or judgment that the rest of us are afforded because everything they say is constantly being deconstructed by pundits and played 300 times in succession on news networks, giving every offhand comment a hyperreal, set-in-stone weight that the original probably didn’t have. Just imagine how you or someone you love might come off if every act or word uttered were subjected to the laws of television news overanalysis— every moment of frustration, giddy delight, or agitation there for the world to judge you with. People who have never met you are now basing their perceptions of you on a two second loop of you getting irate at the guy who cut you off on the highway, and it’s been playing all day and night, making you look increasingly psychotic with every repeat. It’s exactly what happened with Michael Jackson and Britney Spears and countless other celebrities, and it unsurprisingly drove them both to madness. It would most likely happen to you too.
Underlying this fundamentally unfair depiction of you is that while you may have lost your cool for that two seconds, you don’t get credit for the nearly 18 hours of collected calm that you exhibited. Nobody’s watching that part. Therefore, you are branded with the scarlet letter of being the psycho who flipped out when someone cut him off.
How HR’s Enthusiasm for Dirt-Digging is Going to Come Back to Bite It
So far, my point in describing all this is not to excuse occasional idiocy, bad judgment, or the appearance of foolishness, out-of-control behavior, or low ethical standards so much as to universalize it. Knowing that our past mistakes are out there and none of us are truly free from them, the only possible outcome from gross and commonplace hiring practices that seek to find our documented dirt is that candidates who are more undocumented (and therefore more unknown) than their competition are the ones who are more likely to get the job. How? Let’s look at these two potential candidates of equal qualification:
Mike — Online research finds that he admits to drinking and womanizing; is prone to occasional off-color jokes; was once arrested for indecent exposure 8 years ago.
Jeff — online research finds absolutely no information, damaging or otherwise.
In the split second you have to make this hiring decision, the chances are you want to hire Jeff. But consider this unsettling truth for a moment: After looking over their backgrounds, you feel more comfortable with the guy you know less about. In fact, it is the absence of information about Jeff that makes you feel unjustifiably secure about hiring him. You don’t know Jeff’s dirt, and therefore you mentally assume there is none. But as science teaches us, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The idea that ‘Jeff must be clean because we did not find any dirt on him’ is clearly false, but it does not stop our conscious mind from elevating him in comparison to Mike.
The problem is, you can almost never be sure whether that decision is justified or not because you simply do not have the information you need to make a legitimate comparison. As it turns out, Jeff might be a) a serial murderer that makes Mike seem like a great guy in comparison, b) an alcoholic with strikes against him just as bad as Mike, or c) a wonderful, clean-cut young man. You simply do not know which, and you continue to base your hiring practices on prejudices built on vividness: You read that Mike got arrested once and drinks a lot, so you now prefer Jeff.
This tendency should bother you; you are favoring someone who has only earned preferential status by information omission rather than information addition. Your lack of knowledge about this individual, who you have chosen after making a faulty comparison with another candidate whose vivid background rubs you the wrong way, might very well result in a poor hiring match for your company, or even a very damaging personality getting the job.
All of which doesn’t mean a lick of difference to you if the only reason you are screening for dirt is to keep up your company’s appearance with outsiders, which in this context, makes your hiring focus seem awfully misguided. Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but I doubt outsiders give a damn about your employees unless they are dealing with them directly, which again comes back to the question of why you should care about anything your employee does as long as it doesn’t affect his work.
If I Shouldn’t Screen for Dirt, How the Heck Should I Be Hiring?
Hiring someone is a big decision. It can cost a large company between $80,000 to $1,000,000 in training and loss of productivity to bring in new people. It’s not easy. Yet, typical HR departments don’t invest much time or energy in hiring, and tend to do things in ways that are easy rather than effective. Really what they they need is something to judge character on. Ideally, they’d have all the same quantity and quality information about everyone so they could make accurate comparisons. But they don’t. Instead, they look at your resume, ask you some dumb questions, maybe call a couple references, and then search for dirt on you. This automatically— and unfairly— favors people who script their interview responses and who are either careful to hide their dirt, who haven’t gotten caught, or who are lucky enough to not have been documented. This is a very dangerous trend in hiring.
I think that the ideal, but definitely not the most convenient, means of hiring should involve the following:
- A large number of personal references that draw from a wide cross-section of relationships
- A series of real-world interactions in a variety of casual atmospheres conducted by professionals whose job it is to get to know people; this might involve going with the candidate to museums, coffee shops, baseball games, etc. but not really with the pretense of grilling the candidate so much as understanding them and gaining a sense of who they are
- Professional interviews that ask relevant and thought-provoking questions that would demonstrate knowledge, reasoning, critical thinking skills, etc.
- A series of open-ended questions that attempt to determine a candidate’s personal value system and life priorities, and the fit of that to the company
1. Of course, this wasn’t the only issue that separated the two. There were obvious divisions of racism, classism, and religious fears as well.
2. This is not to imply that we should allow bad behavior at work; order obviously needs to be maintained in a professional environment. It’s just that we need to accept that for most people, there’s a division between work and home, and one that hardly anyone wants bridged. After all, as I mentioned in a previous post, we are different people depending on our environment. Our receptivity to different stimuli differs in different places, which is why we don’t feel compelled to drink at work, but that same beer seems enormously inviting the second we step out the door.