How close to ‘evil’ does an applicant need to be before they’re considered un-hireable?

The only downside of this “opportunity” for hiring mangers is that these “experts” joining the team are coming from previous employers with a track record of indifference to user harm, cynical exploitation of users’ data, arrogant indifference to laws and regulations, and a warm embrace of actual *#&$ Nazis. That’s … ah … going to be problematic.

 

Sound familiar?

 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all 16,000 of these newly laid-off Meta and Twitter workers should be held individually responsible for every evil thing their former employers might have done during their tenure. I’m also not saying that all 16,000 workers should be considered completely innocent of what happened on their watch either. Y’all were there, folks. Even if you only went along with Mark’s and Elon’s programs to stay employed … y’all participated in those programs. Whether you believed in those programs or not, your actions helped make really bad things happen … Even if it was indirectly. Even if it was unintentional. Even if you opposed those activities in principle.

 

This presents HR experts a wicked dilemma: is an applicant who contributed to the rise of discrimination, extremist violence, disinformation, and domestic terrorism – be it through action or inaction – someone that you want joining your team and influencing your corporate culture? Is the possible benefit of these people’s technical expertise worth turning a blind eye to the possible evil these people facilitated in their last role?

 

Even if we ignore the potential reputational damage that might arise from customers, suppliers, or shareholders learning that your organisation employed people who facilitated the January 6^th insurrection attempt, we still must consider the damage such a hire will inflict on employee morale, trust, and productivity. Hiring a worker who promoted and encouraged radicalization in their previous job, such as the kind that led to racial-, religious- and gender-themed violence and mass-murder is going to be insanely corrosive to the team dynamic of everyone forced to work with the “new guy.”

 

Is it worth it? That’s the question. For lack of a better term, I call this the “Operation PAPERCLIP” conundrum: How much risk is your organisation willing accept by hiring a technical resource with a problematic past? Where’s your line? How close to ‘evil’ does an applicant need to be before they’re considered un-hireable? Conversely, how much evil can an applicant commit in their former role and still be considered an acceptable hire in our organisation?

 

To be sure, I’m not suggesting that there’s an ethically or philosophically elegant solution to this problem. I’m convinced there isn’t. In most cases, I predict this line will be painfully subjective; this is a purely human problem that’s impossible to quantify.

More importantly, the PAPERCLIP problem isn’t something that can – or should! – be decided arbitrarily at hiring manager level given the potential for severe reputational damage that might arise from offering amnesty to an irredeemable villain or from arbitrarily refusing to interview or select a fully-qualified candidate just because they used to work as a certain company. We should – in an ideal world – judge each applicant solely on their own merits.

 

The problem is, there isn’t any third-party solution for flagging potentially scandalous work projects or practices the way we search for previous arrests through a criminal background check. The only way to find out that Jane Doe was the architect of feature that amplified antisemitic hate speech or subverted content moderation guidelines in favour of hatemongers is to ask them directly and hope you get a truthful answer, or else get one of their former colleagues or a reputable source to rat them out. That’s not a challenge that most HR talent specialists are prepared to take on,

 

The last major headache that comes from the PAPERCLIP problem is that eventually – inevitably – your organisation’s executives will have to draw a line in the stand. Senior leadership’s position might be capricious or meticulously reasoned; what matters is that whatever position they take will draw fire from critics, both inside and outside the company. It’s going to be ugly no matter what they decide, since there’s no broadly accepted “best practice” to fall back on. How much antisemitic or transphobic or racist or violent incel advancement is officially “too much” to accept? How much is “acceptable” in your workforce?

 

That, then, brings us back to the question I asked at the beginning of this article: Should HR screeners treat former employees of Twitter and Facebook like abducted Nazi scientists? The answer seems to be a hard “yes” since these folks are going to start showing up in all our applicant pools in 1Q23. We have positions that need filling, and these are – on paper – qualified candidates. The sooner we decide where our “red lines” are for hiring purposes, the better.