Passive Job Searching, and My Ongoing Thoughts About It

Over the last few years, an increasing number of friends scattered across a variety of industries mentioned that their employers discouraged—even persecuted—anything interpreted as job searching. One company (which many could guess if you know me but a little) even went so far as to demand employees take down long-running LinkedIn and Monster profiles, and ordered managers to stop giving—and even take down—endorsements or recommendations for employees.

Now, I think removing Monster profiles was probably a good thing—that job board has been spammed and mobbed into a C- or D-grade resource for anyone who works with a computer. “Cook Looking For Something Different in Computers”, indeed. But the anecdote repetition got me thinking about the ethics involved in these company’s tactics,hubristic as they are. Persecuting employees for perceived job searching activity is unethical. On company time, I can’t fault HR for the completely deluded notion that employes devote every minute of their time at work to the company’s bottom line. Ideally, that should be a hallmark of the professionalism and respect employees bring to a good, self-respecting job. But confronting employees about their out-of-work activities on career-related websites due to assumptions about job searching is wrong—wholly and with very, very few shades of grey.

As awareness of digital identities increases, employers are learning that the internet is a great way to research candidates for the stains bleached out of résumés. Awareness is only growing; the media love a good tech feature about college-fresh job candidates dropped from consideration due to the archive of their college bong-huffing, hazing, sub-human, foul-mouthed behavior on MySpace. As an infrequent hiring manager, I can see the appeal. But modern HR teams have yet to really describe (to me, at least) how googling a candidate’s past differs from asking questions that bring out potentially discriminatory information. You can’t ask a candidate, “what are your late-night hobbies”, but you can google it. Someone want to clarify where the line is?

Employees, on the other hand, are just as quick as HR teams to realize the trouble spot of questionable digital wake. As a result, we get an ever-increasing collection of websites and services catering to digital “self” management, like Naymz, ClaimID, Jobster and others. But beyond denying the fact you are a real flesh-and-blood-and-stupidity human being, employees quickly learn that managing their digital self also helps position themselves in their field. Search results concerning “’Tiff Fehr’ [vilified drug of choice]” might be of interest to future employers, but the results for “’Tiff Fehr’ web developer” is equally helpful to me. Most job boards these days not only address job opportunities, but also hit up identity management and networking. Any employee worth their salt sees the importance of the latter two. Passive, exploratory job searching is just another research angle. It’s in your careerist interest to keep tabs on shifting job roles, pay scales, team composition and education backgrounds.

To me, this is where it gets muddy—it’s okay for HR to do or hire out “compensation analyses” and “hierarchy level implementations” that affect your skills, position and pay, but it’s not okay for you to keep tabs on tools that help your career research (or at least get caught near them). I’m studying Ajax and DOM scripting because it showed up on peer resumes, education backgrounds, and, most importantly, job descriptions for companies and projects in which I want to be involved. No HR person made that benevolent recommendation to me, and none have ever expressed that level of interest in what I do, even if they hired me.

Passive job searching via RSS—or, hell, actively at the sites themselves—is now so intertwined with being aware of your industry and career that it’s laughable to think it can be quashed with questionably ethical company policy. Any company that does so should be regarded with skepticism, if not a bit of contempt for purely reactive policies. Which encourages job searching. And, in the immortal words of Tevin Campbell (á la Prince), we go ’round and ’round and ’round.

“Can you tell me where we goin’ to?
Can you tell me what it is
We really wanna find?
Is the truth really there?
Or is it right under our hair?
For all we know it’s been there all the time.

I say, nothin’ comes from dreamers but dreams.
I say, sittin at night all in our bowl (TF - ?!)
While everyone else is down the street.
Nothin’ comes from talkers but sound (oh yeah).
We can talk all we want to
But the world still goes around and round.

Round and Round.(Ooh hoo)
We go round and round and round
And what we’re lookin’ for still isn’t found.”

Goddamnit all to hell, now that’s stuck in my head.

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