To: Virginia Flanders, Vice Pres. of HR
From: Qinglong (Leon) Meng
Date: February 18, 2013
Re: Recommendation on hiring employee via Internet search
I’m writing in response to your request for online hiring practices. Besides resume and
interview, Internet research can provide more information about candidates’ real life. In
order to minimize the risks for hiring inapplicable employees and retain the great
employees, I recommend that we use social networking to find innovative and most
qualified candidates. Setting primary and secondary goal as part of formal hiring process.
Goals
Our company’s goal is use online search efficiently to hire the most qualify employees
who can provide most valuable elements for business.
Primary goal
Our primary goal is to hire candidates who bring youth social culture. Since our
company is focused on fashion design, our goal is to find fresh ideas consistently.
Young generation people usually have innovative ideas and they are familiar with
network operations.
Secondary goal
Next goal for the company is to use web search to find out whether candidates
have any unacceptable behaviors or criminal records in recent years. Since our
business always have good reputation and good company’s image, therefore, we’d
like to maintain it in a fast moving world. To protect company’s reputation, we
should eliminate these factors that can influence our public praise.
Basic Approach
Our HR department will select the most suitable applicants from first interview. Then,
our department will do the web searches for them before we interview these candidates
again. In addition, by sorting out a small number of most qualified interviewees will
reduce the amount of time for spending on web searching. It is a cost-effective method.
During our web searches, primary goal and secondary goal are initial objectives.
By using Facebook or Twitter, we can know their creativity, how they are interest in
fashion design, how well they know about fashion and what strange behaviors exist in
their real life. For example, they may publish fashion articles or photos of
fashion design they created through Facebook Page, so we can know how
fresh their ideas and how creativity in fashion designs. By using Google,
we can find some negative information of candidates, which cannot obtain
from paperwork. For instance, we can know their other relevant
information that may affect our business, which might never get from
their resume or Police criminal records.
Once we gathered useful information online, we will give them chance to
discuss what we find online in second interview, either good or bad.
Just like the sentence from article “We Googled You”, “Everyone is
going to have to be a little more forgiving”. We can listen to their
perspective of the stories, so that we will not lose potential employees.
It also can depends on how serious the situation and determine the
results later. Otherwise, if we don’t want to lose talents and great
candidates, we can attempt to give them other fitting positions in the
company.
Risks
Regard to some potential risks associated with our policy, we can avoid
them in reasonable ways.
Privacy
They should not concern about the loss of privacy. We won’t
depart the rules and legalization by hacking their computers or
accounts and ask them for password of any social networks. The
only visible things we get are publicly available information.
Cost
We use a cost-effective way to do the online research. Before we
do the web searches for candidates, we have selected a small
amount of appropriate interviewees from lots of applicants who had
the first interview already. It costs less money and time to do
that.
Discrimination
In order to reduce risks for discrimination, we won’t utilize
information against candidates based on sex, religion and
political opinions and we won’t determinate the result by
individual. The employees from HR department do the research and
interviews, but they must separate irrelevant information like
religion and sex before they hand to the HR manager. Then, our
manager determines the result later.
Potential wrong and great employees
To get rid of the possibilities for hiring the wrong people for
the job and chasing away potentially great employees, we provide
the second interview to reconsider these people and give them
opportunities to explain what their real stories are. And we can
tell them our web researches are visible and public information
only.
In order to recruit the most qualify employees, we want to use Internet to select
innovative younger candidates who can bring the positive image to our company. By
getting their real value through the online background check, we can hire the appropriate
employees rather than recruit the wrong people and lose potentially
great employees. We want to avoid bad situations before it happened. If our company
can adopt my recommendation of online search procedure, we can reduce the risks and
find the suitable employees. I will happy to hear good news from you.