OPUSBOB: Pink Bra Dilemma

I want to talk with you today about an incident that just happened recently with me and one of the candidates from one of my clients.  OPUS is a company that provides candidate assessment services, and one of the important tools we provide is a personality profiling tool. Let me provide you just a little bit of background on the operational side.  When a candidate fills out their personality profile they go to our website, fill in their responses to a URL and click the ‘Submit To’ button. When they do that the OPUS staff gets an e-mail.  We use Outlook and we have a product that we use as well called Xobni, which is an add-on to Outlook which organizes e-mail files.  It brings together any other e-mail we have ever received from that person plus any other files.  The other thing Xobni does is it goes out to the internet and grabs a picture of that person from their public file. So it would be their picture on Facebook, their picture on LinkedIn or any other picture that’s available to the public without a password.  We received one of these e-mails from a female candidate, and with it was her picture, and in her picture she was wearing what appeared to be nothing but a pink bra.

Now we are able to look at that picture because it is her Facebook picture and you could see that behind her she has somebody standing there that clearly has some form of a drink in their hand and it was a “happy time” kind of a picture that was taken. That’s what we received.  As I normally do when somebody does their personality profile, I talk to the individual, review the results of that profile with them, make sure that they feel that it is an accurate reflection of who they are, talk to them about their past, what they have done – and then have a one-on-one conversation with the hiring manager, sharing the results of the profile, talking about the strengths, talking about how the person aligns with other successful people they have in their organization and sharing my perspective on the fit for the candidate.

So here are the four questions I would like you to consider from this particular incident.

Number one, should I have talked to the candidate about the fact that their picture appeared?

Number two, should I have talked with the hiring manager about that particular picture?

Number three, if you were the hiring manager and you found out that the person had a picture like that, would it have effected your decision to hire or not hire the person?

And number four, should either the hiring manager or human resources make it a practice to check the social network of a candidate or before extending an offer to that person?

One last point, this is not a candidate that’s in the United States.

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Tags: candidate assessment services, Facebook, hiring manager, LinkedIn, personality profiling, social network background check