I don't think that's true for all companies. The big, multi-national company I work for keeps all candidate assessment form that have been filled out by the interviewer (even for summer interns). Of course we're trained beforehand to not put stuff in the form that could be construed as discriminatory based on protected classes.
You have to keep in mind that if a candidate is rejected and comes back and says it was illegal discrimination, those forms are valuable evidence to show why the candidate was not selected. Get rid of the forms and it's basically your word against theirs in court.
That said, I've also been told that no one every goes to the trouble to dig those up later on. Even for current employees. You could get a letter of reprimand put in your file and nobody would probably see it again (this comment came from HR).
The university I worked for had a very strict hiring process, and it was all recorded as well.
The process worked something like this:
1) Get approval from HR to start the hiring process. Your department needs to have the money to hire someone, and a need to fill a position. I'm not sure how either is decided.
2) Define the position. Several people are involved here, basically you define the role and the areas of expertise that you want and need.
3) Information from 2 gets sent back to all involved parties, and everyone ranks the skills by necessity and comments on things.
4) HR takes the information and creates job listings, and collects candidates.
5) Interviews take place, and you grade applications according to what you decided in 3.
6) Hire someone who satisfies the requirements and did well in the interviews.
There's some leeway in the system because the interview and the judgment of the interviewers matters, but you can't just accept somebody because you like them, and you can't reject someone because you don't.
As for what happens with an applicant's information after they're rejected... I'm not sure where it goes or whether it gets called up again if they re-apply. Our department was pretty small though, if we didn't hire you the first time, we won't have forgotten you by the second time around.
" Get rid of the forms and it's basically your word against theirs in court."
Isn't that the ideal situation to be in, if you're the defendant? The burden of proof rests on the employee to prove discrimination. From the company's point of view, surely, the fewer forms, the less proof.
In a civil suit, the standard is "preponderance of evidence". In a he said, she said situation, circumstantial evidence becomes very important. If you've hired a hundred black lesbian octogenarians, and you're sued by a class of 20-something latino hetero males, you better be able to prove your hiring process wasn't discriminatory.
Some jurisdictions also shift the burden of proof under some circumstances so it is actually worse for the defendant.
In Germany the interviewers notes and all the other documents related to the candidate have to be destroyed when they are not needed any more
(Datensparsamkeit, literally data austerity, officially data reduction and data economy).
When a candidate is rejected there is period of to months they can sue for discrimination. After that one additional month is considered to be justifiable.
So everything has to be destroyed three months after the rejection letter if there is no discrimination case.
I was thinking for example: I can request a copy from my employer of HR docs specific to me. Does this only apply because I'm employed, or does it extend to interview notes?
The parent was discussing illegal discrimination -- if you were suing for any reason, part of the process would be discovery, in which you may request documents and information for use in your case.[1]
You actually think "interview notes" are recorded anywhere formally? Pretty unlikely in 90% of corporations. You're likely requesting something from the circular file.
I used to be the IT Director for a document scanning business in the UK.
Scanning paper HR records was the single most painful job we had to do. The entire file became a complete legal nightmare purely because it stopped being paper and became covered by Data Protection.
Usually the HR department had to go through every single employee file and shred any documents that might be grounds for legal action before they got scanned.
The process before scanning was:
- employee is annoyed
- employee requests their HR file
- HR sanitise file and sends it to employee
after scanning, every single page was indexed. So they couldn't react to a request by destroying pages (because there'd be holes in the index). So they had to sanitise every single file before scanning.
I understand the point of Data Protection law, but in this case it was really counter-productive. Evidence was destroyed wholesale.
That sounds like "working as intended" - after all, if instead of just requesting their file the employee had initiated legal action against you, it would have been illegal to destroy those documents. And it also raises the question of which part of your HR process is generating incriminating documents in the first place?
not so much "incriminating" as "not required to be kept and could possibly be misconstrued".
Not our HR process, our customer's. What was actually destroyed depended on their interpretation of the law.
One common one was the Data Protection requirement to not keep inaccurate data meant that all but the latest employee change of address forms had to be destroyed. Easy to implement post-scanning, pain in the arse to do pre-scanning.
Thank you. I guess I didn't articulate it well enough for the grand parent comment here. I guess we could make an exception for personal AND non-commercial diaries but if you make business decisions that affect me based on information you store about me, then I should have a right to see them.
I'm also thinking about the rights of everyone including criminal (including terror) suspects to see (I am specifically not asking permission to alter or delete, that's another conversation) all the information the government (and their agents in the private sector) stores about them.
I know it sounds onerous specially because of the issue of authentication (how does the CIA know that it is me who is asking for information about me and not someone impersonating me?) and I don't have a good solution for these questions.
This is a ridiculous idea to me. If I run a business, my internal evaluations of candidates and employees are no one's business but my own. They are my observations about the world, with the productive end of hiring better employees. Whether my decisions affect you or not is really not relevant; we make free decisions that affect other people all the time. I take issue with any claim that people have legally-binding private obligations to each other beyond abiding by contracts, and refraining from violence and fraud.
OK, what about a compromise: you can keep your conclusions private, you only need to disclose to me the raw data you used to reach such conclusions. Is that better?
We keep a record of all coding exercises performed by people who want to come in for an interview. We reference it for those who reapply to see if there has been improvement. All of our interview questions are in a github repo and peer reviewd so you don't get those brain teaser useless questions.
I wish we took notes during interviews. On well. We still remember candidates who apply multiple times.
If people are graded based on improvement, does that mean you could play the long game and intentionally fail the first time, then win the award for "most improved" next year?
To get this out of the way, here's my implementation for this year:
int main() {
return 1;
}
Let me know when you're ready for next year's submission.
If you know what you're doing, it's difficult to look like you're trying to figure out what you're doing.
If you had the acting skills to convincingly give off the impression that you're a novice programmer, you've also got the skills to convincingly give off a more directly useful impression.
I assumed all companies did this actually. The company I work for (it's a relatively small one, ~60 employees) does this.
Although, the actual interviews and results are kept secret from the rest of the company—apart from higher-ups—I got insight into them because I was asked to filter out through some final candidates by interviewing them. I realised that they kept notes from past interviews, and based on the fact that one of the interviewees progressed a lot in a 2 year period, I was inclined to put him on top of the list of my recommendation.
I feel like the ability to change is more important than just plain knowledge. More importantly, be mature and accept you "sucked" because {reasons} and work on yourself to improve, rather than be immature and "pridefully" (for a lack of better word) refuse critique.
Do they improve? This is a fascinating data set to have. Other questions I have is do the clueless improve? Do the bright, but inexperienced improve? Can you tell what candidates to contact again after a year and invite back for a new interview?
I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but the only one of your acronyms I'm familiar with is UK. But perhaps that because my answer to your first question would be 'no'.
It's information about an identifiable living individual. (In this context, Personal information is information about a person, not information owned by a person.)
The legal definition of personal information for DPA purposes (https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...) specifically includes "any expression of opinion about the individual and any indication of the intentions of the data controller or any other person in respect of the individual".
> Not only does fear of lawsuits prevent companies from disclosing no-hire reasons, it prevents them from even recording those reasons internally.
I don't get this mentality.
A) I seem to be unaware of the rash of lawsuits befalling companies that provide feedback. I admit I just may be ignorant of them.
B) It seems that not recording reasons actually makes the company more vulnerable. When you combine a "preponderance of evidence" legal standard with "Lies, damn lies, and statistics" it seems like it would be easy for a litigious candidate and a good lawyer to force a settlement or get a favorable jury ruling if the company cannot present hard evidence that said candidate was not hired because of X, Y, and Z non-protected reasons. In fact, that is the reason given in discussions about why it is so hard to fire people for going though the PIP process instead of just cutting them loose.
The lawsuits are discrimination lawsuits. Candidates will allege racial, gender, or age discrimination. If you given them any sort of justification, plaintiff's council will go searching through your organization for anyone who works there already and fails to pass whatever justification you provided.
Then, jurors are free to infer that the real reason why intentional bias and the justification was just a cover story.
Exactly this. An attorney will practically start salivating if a despondent candidate comes to them with a story of not getting hired and the company telling them they weren't a good "culture fit."
Most large companies stay out of a 10-foot-pole range of anything that legal labels with the L word (liability). The fact that not giving reasons because of liability is commonly accepted wisdom in recruiting means that deviating from it takes a lot of work.
Specifically, a talent acquisition manager/executive would have to make a business case about how exposing the company to liability from outsiders would somehow pay for itself.
The only plausible argument that I can think of is that you could market your recruiting process as transparent and then get some additional candidates based on that. But.. can you really postulate that some candidate that is reading about your recruiting process in depth would be highly enticed by this to actually apply, as opposed to verbiage about other perks? Can you guarantee that having a free "recruiter feedback on your application" service available to anyone out there won't create a great incentive for random candidates to apply just for that? What if there is a data leak and all this prejudicial, personally identifiable information ends up on the web?
That's just what came to mind in 5 seconds. If the argument for creafting, storing and providing the rejection information sounds like a stretch, it's because it's a tough sell.
About the actual legal requirement, OFCCP compliant companies have to record disposition reasons for candidates that they don't hire when some conditions are met (candidates have expressed interest in a position and they were evaluated based on "substantial information"). In my experience, these disposition reasons try deliberately to be vague. Regular companies don't, and most likely won't because of the liability issues mentioned above. For reference, here's the go-to FAQ on OFCCP requirements: http://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/faqs/offaqs.htm
Absence of evidence is not evidence. Not having hiring records on anyone is not proof that a company is discriminating.
> that is the reason given in discussions about why it is so hard to fire people for going though the PIP process instead of just cutting them loose
That is a different case though. In the event of a firing, you have their work performance leading up to that event to take into account. If you have a black woman who has worked at a place for many years with favorable job reviews who is then suddenly let go after a new white manager is hired, they can present their work history at that company as an argument that they were let go for less than legitimate reasons.
In case of discrimination alegations (race, disability and veteran-related matters in the US), the burden is on the accused to provide proof of non-discrimination.
In this case, the usual practice for proving innocence is to show that the statistical distribution of hires is similar to the statistical distribution of applicants. For example, if I had 50% latino applicants, 50% of my hires should be latinos.
That being said, the sort of publicity these issues get mean that companies try really hard to steer clear of any discrimination accusations. It's a delicate problem to handle.
I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws for this and other reasons. I suggest a compromise of limiting it to manual labor jobs and the like for which the anti-discrimination laws were actually designed for.
At a well-known Java school in the Southern US the student body is ~ 2/3 Indian and 1/3 Chinese, the secretarial staff is 1/2 white, 1/2 Latino, and the tech support staff is 100 % white. It's an odd distribution, no matter how much you dislike anti-discrimination laws.
In places as rotten as that one you'd ideally fire everyone and rehire from 4 states away. Antidiscrimination laws are weak tea, but the only tool we have. You sit and hope that the University President takes note after the first suit and fires management.
It really, really depends on the company. A certain company has interviewed and rejected me three times, for the last two times the interviewers showed up with lists of questions from previous times.
From the other side of the desk, wouldn't you be impressed if you had a candidate come in for another interview, and they explicitly tell you that you had interviewed them previously and they understood their weaknesses at that time. And they're looking forward to show you just how much their chops have improved in the meantime, and then proceed to do just that?
If I'm very proud of my company, I might be flattered that they too want to work at the same company so much. If my company's just a'ight, I'll think "why? and where have you been working in the meantime?" Additionally I might feel a little sorry for them, at first. If they actually do amaze me with how much they've improved, I would kick myself for failing to notice their potential the first time, and recommend them for immediate hire. I don't think I'd ever feel impressed with them. They'd deserve to feel impressed with themselves though, unless they totally blow it / show no improvement in which case I'm back to just feeling sad for them...
How can I understand my weaknesses at the last interview if you didn't tell me what they are in the first place? Surely you don't expect me to improve upon a total lack of feedback?
I used to worry about blanket rejections. Not any more. They're not actionable, so I ignore them.
If you get rejected and don't know why, take heart: a year from now the company also won't know why. You can apply again as if it were Groundhog Day.