This does apply to third party background checks, and backdoor references in particular are just one giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Eightfold AI is getting sued right now for acting as a credit reporting agency -- not just by scoring people, but by gathering data on them in the first place for the sake of reporting to employers.
If you ask a third party business to do run a background check, there are a bunch of responsibilities that triggers -- a right to view what's in the report, a right to know if it's being used against you, a right to dispute what's in it, and even to consent to it being pulled in the first place.
But if some recruiter or hiring manager goes directly to your former or current boss, behind your back, this is somehow not even taken seriously as a problem.
Wait... are you saying that talking about an ex-colleague with anyone (without filing a bunch of paperwork or something) is a "giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act"?
Yes. But to be clear, since "anyone" is vague: I specifically mean talking to hiring teams, about ex-colleagues who haven't given them permission to ask around in the first place.
Because the Fair Credit Reporting Act governs background checks. It isn't limited to money, or to scoring -- it covers any third party that reports data about you, for the sake of determining if you're eligible for anything from a loan to an apartment to a job. The language of it is broad enough that it doesn't just cover your spending and payment habits, but extends to your general habits, criminal history, personal character, and "mode of living."
I'm saying the behavior normalized by recruiters is a giant loophole in the Fair Credit Reporting Act.
Because when they proactively reach out to random individuals you worked with, to ask you for your views on them as a reference, without your consent, that is an exploit. It is a workaround. It is skirting the actual intentions of the thing, because it covers "agencies" -- which, no matter how broad that term might be, third party data collectors.
If something your boss said about you came up on a background check, you would have a right to know about it. But if someone on a hiring team goes behind your back to that same boss, for those same comments, that is widely accepted as fine and normal.
I'm not sure the incentive here is strong enough. For a specific profile they want, at $2500 for every 30 days, I could see businesses just paying that fine as an operational cost.
The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location.
I will keep this in mind while working with reps in other states to encourage a more aggressive policy stance with regards to ghost jobs.
> The incentive also exists, for the kinds of employers who would post ghost jobs, to also force in-person work again. You don't have to pay these fines to multiple states on one ghost job if the job is only available in one location.
I've landed on a similar hot take after one job offer got rescinded by a company that refused to give a reason, to anyone involved, and then wouldn't honor records requests. (But would send me a candidate survey.)
With any job, it would be one thing if it were at the applicant stage, and I hadn't talked to a person at any point. But with this one, there was an offer in front of me and there was no one at all who had both the capacity and the willingness to explain what had just happened.
If I started the job and they pulled this on day three, they would have to give a reason to an unemployment office.
I don't care how little inclination businesses have to tell the truth. Make them commit to the lie, in writing, somewhere that it actually costs something.
Most of my knowledge of new tools comes from newsletters, forums, and content creators. I find things through passive media consumption (and, where I can get it, discourse with other enthusiasts) more often than I find them in the course of trying to solve specific problems.
But not all managers think that your learning sources are valid, and care more that you spend time on their learning paths. Even if it's your off time.
(Yes, there is a story attached to this haha... and more importantly, several different writeups[1][2][3] on how random internet wanderings have been more beneficial to my overall technological capability than people who insist on the importance of a CS background when building dashboards and client UIs. In practice, thanks to a dev box with insufficient RAM, and your typical tabbed-browsing problem, I used `pkill` over `ssh` -- something I picked up from toying with Over the Wire levels in my off time -- a lot more often than I used linked lists at that job.)
If an interviewer, who has the power to deny you a job unless your answers are satisfactory to them, is unprofessional enough to abuse that by pressing you for inappropriate personal details during the interview, then there actually is no correct answer.
You can't assume that person is going to act in good faith about anything else in that situation, so even refusing to take the bait is still ultimately a roulette wheel that can just as easily be labeled as "difficult" or "combative."
If it would be unprofessional to bring those things up freely, then it's actually more unprofessional to coerce people about them as a screening criteria -- whether that's coercing them into putting on a show of dancing around the issues, or coercing them into giving you honest answers.
A candidate can be aware that these kinds of questions are supposed to have boundaries, but that's different from whether an interviewer understands or respects that. And if they don't, those people are also in a decision-making capacity that doesn't often empower you to just say "no."
Even when those things are scoped to "...at work," there are still answers that happen at work that are equally inappropriate to go digging for. "Tell me about a time you experienced adversity," for instance, could turn up health or family details that people might have juggled with their jobs -- things that you aren't actually supposed be considering as a factor in these decisions.
I also don't know, when someone is spending 90min screening you for "culture fit," that you can assume they're asking you for things that are strictly related to the job. They should be, but that's different from whether that's always a realistic presumption you can make.
I've had some rather interesting interviews myself, with several of my most ridiculous stories ironically being from here.
One guy -- the reason I started building a tracking tool, after I noticed that his email was autofilling when I went to send him a message -- ghosted me after I wasn't available the first day and time he suggested. Which was also a holiday.
Another place, a stealth startup, was a panel interview with their three founders -- two tech leads and the CEO. The tech leads actually had really interesting discourse, and I wish I could remember the name of the guy who told me that "testing means never having to use my brain for the same thing twice." It actually never occurred to me before that an interview could provide you with useful knowledge, let alone that an interviewer could make a point of imparting those things on purpose. However, their CEO asked me to commit 5 years of my life up while also refusing to tell me anything at all about what the company did.
Within the past year I also encountered one that expressly asked me for things I didn't like about a previous employer; badgered me when I didn't want to elaborate about a specific, traumatizing, walking HR complaint of a man; and then -- after I described vaguely how organizations and their leadership change over time -- explicitly asked me to rate that individual on a scale.
(The other two were a while ago, and Idk that they still exist, but the last company was SerpAPI, who advertises here fairly regularly.)
Eightfold AI is getting sued right now for acting as a credit reporting agency -- not just by scoring people, but by gathering data on them in the first place for the sake of reporting to employers.
If you ask a third party business to do run a background check, there are a bunch of responsibilities that triggers -- a right to view what's in the report, a right to know if it's being used against you, a right to dispute what's in it, and even to consent to it being pulled in the first place.
But if some recruiter or hiring manager goes directly to your former or current boss, behind your back, this is somehow not even taken seriously as a problem.
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