Popular Articles

Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

read more
by Lindsey Davis
June - July 2013

Related Article

Unlocking a second chance

Read more

Don’t just hire, do it right

Read more

Employers can access social network info, but they better beware

In the United States alone, there are more than 158 million active users on Facebook, more than 59 million active users on Twitter and more than 78 million profiles on LinkedIn. It is therefore likely your employees and prospective employees have a presence on at least one of the most popular social networking sites. But employers need to be cautious.

While employers continue to explore a prospective employee’s work history and qualifications through the interview process, some employers are also reviewing prospective employees’ personal social networking accounts. Twenty percent of organizations use social networking sites to screen prospective employees and another 12 percent plan to do so, according to an April 2013 study by the Society for Human Resource Management.

Some employers believe access to the personal social networking accounts of prospective employees is needed to make the best and most-informed hiring decision. On the other hand, some view this practice as an invasion of personal privacy.

Regardless of your view, the practice of using prospective employees’ personal social networking accounts during the hiring process raises a set of legal concerns. These are questions to explore:

  • Is it legal for an employer to request the passwords for a prospective employee’s personal social networking accounts during the hiring process?
  • May an employer require social networking account passwords as a condition of employment?
  • How may an employer use information discovered on a prospective employee’s social networking account?

A brief summary follows of several potential legal concerns swirling around this topic.

Fair game?

Passwords are fair game, but do employers want them? This is a key question. Attempts to pass federal laws banning employers from asking for social networking site password have been unsuccessful.

The most recent attempt was as an add-on provision to the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). While CISPA was passed into law, the add-on provision addressing employers asking for social networking site passwords was not part of the final bill. Additionally, the proposed Password Protection Act of 2012 was not enacted.

At the same time, a number of states have enacted their own legislation addressing this issue. Since 2012, four states—California, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan—have enacted legislation prohibiting employers from requesting or requiring an employee or applicant to disclose a user name or password for a personal social networking account.

Similar legislation was proposed in the Minnesota Legislature in 2012 but was not enacted. The Minnesota Legislature this past session considered legislation that, if enacted, would have prohibited employers from requiring, as a condition for consideration of employment, passwords to social networking websites.

The proposed legislation would not have limited an employer’s right to develop and maintain otherwise lawful workplace policies governing the use of the employer’s electronic equipment, including policies regarding internet use, social networking site use and e-mail use.

The legislation didn’t pass, and as of this spring, neither federal nor Minnesota state law prohibits asking prospective employees for their social networking site passwords. Employers in Minnesota may request such information and condition employment upon the receipt of such information.

However, before doing so, and before using information collected from prospective employees’ social networking accounts, employers should first consider the following:

Consistency in an employer’s hiring practice helps treat all prospective employees equally. If an employer is going to review any prospective employee’s social networking profiles, the employer should look at the social networking profiles of all prospective employees who have them.

As with all information gathered regarding a prospective employee, information obtained from a social networking profile cannot be used to discriminate on a basis proscribed by applicable Federal or state laws. 

Certain information that cannot be used in making a hiring decision is often accessible on social networking profiles. In accessing such information, employers may later be in a position of having to explain that such prohibited data was not used in the hiring decision.

Always verify

Employers should also consider whether information from social networking sites can be verified and whether such information will be relevant to a prospective employee’s work-related potential or performance.

In light of these legal and practical concerns, it is unclear whether employers are backing away from using social networking sites to screen job candidates. However, the April 2013 SHRM study reported that about two-thirds of organizations have never used or no longer use social networking sites to screen prospective employees.

Information obtained by an employer regarding a prospective employee for purposes of a hiring decision must be viewed within a legal framework. Given the rising trend of states enacting legislation concerning this practice, employers should stay updated on changes in federal and state laws.