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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing that none of the people commenting on the original article have ever hired anyone. There's plenty of precedent for this. There are things you aren't allowed to take into consideration when hiring (e.g. sexual orientation, religion, etc) and so as an interviewer, I simply don't ask anything that could result in me knowing. Even social break-the-ice questions like "what did you do at the weekend?" are off limits at interview stage. The reason is to protect myself and the company; if we don't hire a candidate because they lack skills, they can't turn around and sue us on spurious grounds.

So no serious interviewer is looking at FB anyway - it opens up too many potential issues.

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That wouldn't disallow them from screening in the pre-interview stage though, would it? If the company sees something on Facebook that they don't like, it'd be virtually impossible to prove what effect it had on their decision to not interview someone.

That's true, but if it becomes a habit it would show up eventually, e.g. if the company never hired anyone of "type x".

It's very easy to not-hire someone anyway; you can say "not a cultural fit" which means they wouldn't get on with the team. But it would be suspicious if that correlated well with a readily observable characteristic.

But any readily observable characteristic would either manifest as something illegal to discriminate on (sexual orientation, weight, sex, appearance, etc.) or as something not illegal to discriminate on in the first place.

Illegal discriminatory hiring practices are very specific, so suspicious or not, it doesn't matter. There's no legal grounds for someone to sue a company because they used Facebook to determine that they don't like "Fight Club" or that they eat a lot of Burger King and were thusly not hired.

On FB you could easily see someone's sexual orientation, for example, or the year they graduated. It's better not to look. If you hire them and you get on outside work, then by all means add them as friends and you can see all you want.

In the context of Hacker News (i.e. smaller web startups), keep in mind that Title VII (and the ADA) only applies to companies with 15 or more employees. A tremendous amount of hiring flies under Title VII's radar.

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