What are reference checkers being told about you?



By Kate Southam

Have you ever had that creeping feeling that the reason you didn’t get a job was because someone said something unflattering about you?

Perhaps a manager who had seemed fine up until the day you left suddenly turned toxic when the reference checker called. Or perhaps an enthusiastic recruiter cooled on you after seeing your racy photos from Indy on Facebook.

Recruiters and employers must gain a candidate’s permission to reference check the referees nominated by the candidate. However, in some cases a candidate is asked to sign a blanket permission form that gives the recruiter or potential reference checker permission to call people not nominated as referees.  

Under the existing Privacy Act you can apply to an employer or a recruiter to see notes made about you during the recruitment process.

Harmers Workplace Lawyers senior associate, Bronwyn Maynard, says candidates can apply directly to the employer or recruiter. There is no third-party process.

Ms Maynard says employers can refuse to show you the notes under certain circumstances such as where the records include personal information about others or are commercially sensitive.

Also, there is no set timeframe for employers to follow but Ms Maynard says expecting an answer back within 30 days is reasonable.

When you view any notes made about you, check to see if they are accurate and “relevant”. You can request any inaccuracies be corrected. If you deem the information “irrelevant”, you can make a complaint to the Privacy Commissioner.

When contacted by CareerOne.com.au, a spokesperson for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner  said that as of July 2009 no complaints had been made.

Information gathered by viewing a candidate’s social networking pages is a good example of what could be deemed irrelevant.

An example provided to CareerOne by an employer involved a candidate being rejected for the role of receptionist after the employer had viewed her Facebook page and decided she “too many “friends”. The employer feared the candidate would be spending all her work time updating her posts and so did not hire her.

Ms Maynard says she knows of at least one organisation that “implemented formal policies [to] forbid the use of social media as a research tool for candidate information gathering – as they deemed this type of personal information to be illegitimate and irrelevant to their business.”

“Importantly, employers must remember that these privacy obligations apply even if the information gathered was obtained from a public source as would be the case for many personal details included on an individual’s blog, twitter, Facebook or MySpace page,” she said.

The Privacy Act also requires employers and recruiters to tell you they have collected personal information about you; explain the purpose of gathering the information and let you know who else will see the information.

Ms Maynard says the Fair Work Act, which came into effect on July 1, 2009, offers candidates added protections.

Under the “General Protections” section of the Fair Work Act, employers and recruiters cannot treat someone adversely for exercising a workplace right.

Put in the recruitment context, this could mean that if you had made an unfair dismissal claim or worker’s compensation claim in the past, this information could not be used to discriminate against you on the job hunt.

There is nothing to stop a savvy line manager or recruiter from using social networking as a screening tool but omitting that fact from their notes.

Republished from the Cube Farmer blog on news.com.au, July 20, 2009.