Social Intelligence protects employers, prospective employees

Originally posted 07/12/2011 on lubbockonline.com

Last year I told you about a company called Social Intelligence that scours the web for your social media presence as a (for fee) service for companies. It took a while longer, but the guys and gals at Gizmodo.com heard about them, and decided to test out the service on six of their people. Mat Honan was the (un)lucky employee that failed the test and as a consequence, got to tell the tale.

He tells it in unflinching detail, including the full report, which is redacted by Social Intelligence to prevent any inappropriate details from being divulged. Inappropriate in this case means details that it is illegal for an employer to ask prospective employees. Social Intelligence is very dilligent about that. The one really good thing about this service is that it protects both the employer and the prospective employee. Social Intelligence only passes on data that is allowed by law, which protects the employer from charges of discrimination, applicants from actual discrimination.

This isn't really surprising, it's a natural progression from the data mining that is already being done. While it does shield both parties from the possibility of illegal discrimination there's no way of knowing what it might find and how irrelevant it might be now. I've been online since 1987, and while I don't think I've ever done anything online that might cost me a job, I have to ask myself, what might they find?

Edited @ 8:20am for clarity by Bert

Predicting employee behavior available now

In a column titled, "'Pre-crime' Comes to the HR Dept.", Mike Elgin talked about a new industry, fortune telling.

Ok, he's not actually talking about fortune telling in the traditional sense. He is talking about predicting how people and companies will act in the future based on how they've acted in the past. He talks about two companies. The first is Social Intelligence, a company that scours social networks to provide information on prospective employees to companies. The idea is that information found on social networks is a better indicator of what kind of employee you will be than your resume.

The second company he talks about is Recorded Future. Recorded Future also scours the web to predict the future actions of people and companies. It attempts to find logical links that make it possible to make those predictions.

These are two companies, but how long before this type of algorithm is common in HR departments? What happens when hiring, firing and promotions are determined by predictions of future performance rather than past performance? What happens when software predicts that you will leave within 6 months? Will the company fire you preemptively?

For many of us, having an online presence is unavoidable, or even necessary. What does our online presence say about us? What kind of impression are we giving, and what kind of predictions can be made from it? As new and better predictive algorithms are developed the tidbits we leave online will become more important. Having control over as many as those tidbits as possible is the only way to have any control over our own lives. As things are now, we are at the mercy of the data miners who build profiles to predict what we like, what we don't like and how to convince us we need things. In the near future they will also be determining whether and how much money we have by telling our employers whether we should be given a raise, a promotion, or even a job.