Question

The city of Bozeman, Montana, requires job candidates to list their social networking sites, usernames, and passwords on the city employee application. City Attorney Greg Sullivan explained that the city has “positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here. So, we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the City.” No prospective employee has yet to remove his/her name because of the requirement. Yet, with such high access to a prospect’s profile, it could become difficult for human resources to not be aware of a candidate’s ethnicity or even religious affiliation.

Has the city justified its decision to ask for this information? Would you be comfortable if a prospective employer asked you for this information? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Depending upon the positions offered to employees the city has asked for details regarding the username and password of the social networking sites which is actually not justified because I believe that in order to understand the moral character of an employee there are other means through which that can be deciphered or determined. Personal information like username and password of social networking sites is not a justified way to conduct such aspects. The organization can conduct situation reaction test and even word association test to understand such factors which are being used by organizations and are considered to be effective in determining moral character for any position even for the officer position in armed force.

No, I will not be comfortable because I feel that the social media is a personal space and the employer has to right to intrude in such spheres, it may be true and effective to analyze the activities and behavior in social media but it is unethical to ask for. The applicants can actually provide such details but organizations need to think of alternatives so that the process is accepted by one and all.