Communications of the ACM
Sharing Personal Info Via Online Social Networks Can Lead to Hiring Discrimination
Credit: She Means Business
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have found evidence that sharing personal information via online social networks can lead to hiring discrimination.
The researchers tested the impact that information posted on a popular social networking site by job candidates can have on employers' hiring behavior. "Our experiment focused on a novel tension: the tension between the law — which, in the United States, protects various types of information, making it risky for certain personal questions to be asked during interviews — and new information technologies, such as online social networks, which make that same information often available to strangers, including interviewers and employers," says CMU professor Alessandro Acquisti. Based on the study, the researchers estimate that a minority of U.S. employers regularly searches for candidates online. "While it appears that a relatively small portion of U.S. employers regularly searches for candidates online, we found robust evidence of discrimination among certain types of employers," says CMU's Christina Fong.
The researchers used online data posted by actual members of popular social networking and job-seeking sites to design job candidate resumes and online profiles for their experiments. "Our survey and field experiments show statistically significant evidence of hiring bias originating from information candidates shared on their online profiles," Fong says.
From Carnegie Mellon University
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Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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