Maybe one of the most scary, but useful changes in the job search has been the amount of data publicly available for people to find. Especially in the IT field. I can’t count the number of times now I have used this information to investigate people and companies to weigh my employment options. I’m not talking just a quick search on GlassDoor or LinkedIn. I’m talking you find people who might be on your future team, future managers, coworkers etc. and you see from a digital paper trial how they participate or submit bugs to public or Open Source projects, what forums they are on, and how they handle those who they may disagree with through these various public facing mediums. It’s now super easy, at least in the IT industry, to create a fairly close personality profile based on a lot of public information provided. With simply a name and some publicly available information from any of the major social/business network sites you can find user handles and start your research.
I’m of course looking at this from the perspective of an employee, but what about an employer? Should this not change the way people are assessed? I have never heard of an employee giving out an assessment to a future employer, though with the need currently for some IT roles I feel that they could, but this seems to be a disadvantage for the employee unless they are willing to go out of their way to find out such information. If the employee though can find out such information, you have to wonder why can’t the employer? Just like an employee can search for individuals by name, then user handle, then hit up gitlab or github and check company projects (if public) along with issues and bug reports, so can the employer. In fact there’s most likely more information employers can gleam using some of the business social sites with corporate accounts that give more information then a standard user may have.
My point in all of this is if you (a hiring manager/generalist/company) are sending a few question assessment out first (especially using a Google Doc to do so, you know who you are) then from my perspective, as a hiring department, you are lazy and failing at your job. In the IT field if you haven’t learned to Google someone yet, checkout their gitlab or github, or just use a personal contact to asses their general aptitude for the job, then your hiring systems is broken. In the wider view of things if your hiring system is broken and you’re not investing the time and effort needed to utilize publicly available information on future employees then you’re undermining your job success and job security. Don’t be lazy and rely on an assessment, please do your research, or send an assessment off the bat and let people know they’re not interested in working for you.
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