A Devil of a Lawsuit

The Massachusetts Employment Law Letter has an interesting take on the dangers of finding information about job applicants via the Internet:

Many of you have chosen to create (or have your attorneys create) carefully crafted applications and interview outlines designed to avoid asking impermissible questions or soliciting information that's illegal to consider in making an employment decision.

With the advent of the information superhighway, however, a whole ocean of information about virtually everyone washes up on the shore of your computer screen. Type a name into any search engine, and you're likely to pull up all kinds of information. Gathering information in that manner is easy. What that information is, however, and how you use it can be problematic.
For instance, if you search an applicant's name, you might find that she is protected because of age (if she graduated from college before 1984). Of course, that's information you no doubt will be able to figure out when you meet for an interview.

But what if the name also showed up on the list of members of an unusual religious group, say The Satanic Community: 600 Club? (Many such websites name some members.) Such information can be the basis for an employment discrimination lawsuit.

Read the entire article here.