Online privacy in job recruitment processes? Boundary work among cybervetting recruiters

• Author: Christel Backman,Anna Hedenus
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12140
• Published date: 01 July 2019
• Date: 01 July 2019

© 2019 The Authors

New Technology, Work and Employment

published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Online privacy in job recruitment processes 157

New Technology, Work and Employment 34:2

ISSN 1468-005X

Online privacy in job recruitment processes?

Boundary work among cybervetting

recruiters

Christel Backman and Anna Hedenus

This article addresses various ways that cybervetting recruiters

(re)construct boundaries around the public–private division.

Based on interviews with 37 recruiters in Sweden, we show

how the practice of cybervetting is legitimised by the recruit-

ers’ descriptions and accounts in relation to various notions

of privacy and norms of information ow. We present this as

a boundary work aided by especially two ways of framing in-

formation: the repertoire about accessible information and the

repertoire of relevant information. These repertoires help dene

what information can be conceived of as public or private, and

as legitimate versus unethical to search for and to use. Privacy

is framed by employers as a responsibility, rather than a right,

for social network site users. The ndings also underline sim-

ilarities and differences in jobseekers’ and employers’ norms

of information ow, not least considering the right to online

privacy.

Keywords: cybervetting, recruitment, boundary work, privacy,

public/private, contextual integrity.

Introduction

Throughout history, technological development has repeatedly affected the bounda-

ries between home, work and private life. These distinctions between the private and

public realms—and those between work and home—are contextual and continually

reconstructed (Nippert- Eng, 1996, 2010). Historically, industrialisation and technolog-

ical development, represented by developments such as factories and clocks, drew a

Christel Backman (christel.backman@gu.se), University of Gothenburg, Sweden, is an assistant profes-

sor in sociology at the Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg. Her main

research interest is surveillance studies, with a specic interest in work life issues. She has published in

Surveillance & Society, Acta Sociologica, The International Journal of Human Resource Management,

and in various Swedish Journals.

Anna Hedenus, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, is an associate professor in sociology at the De-

partment of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg. Her main research interest are on

the effects of digitalization on jobs, work processes and skill requirements, self-selection and selection

on the labour market, and work attitudes. She has published in The International Journal of Human

Resource Management, Surveillance & Society, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, British Journal of

Sociology, Acta Sociologica, Sociology, Gaming Research and Review Journal and World Leisure Jour-

nal. In addition, she has contributed with several book chapters and publications in various Swedish

Journals.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits

use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modications or

adaptations are made.

158 New Technology, Work and Employment© 2019 The Authors

New Technology, Work and Employment

published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

line between (paid) work and non(- paid) work. When modern bureaucracies evolved,

a distinct boundary between private and work life became essential to ensure objectiv-

ity and resistance to bribery (McDonald and Thompson, 2016). Later, personal com-

puters, mobile phones and the Internet once again reshaped time and spatial boundaries

by enabling teleworking, from home and from coffee shops, during vacations and

while travelling (Rothbard and Ollier- Malaterre, 2016; Wilner etal., 2017). The devel-

opment of social media has added to the altering or blurring of boundaries between

realms of our lives that were until recently considered separate (Trottier, 2012;

McDonald and Thompson, 2016).

In recruitment, the contemporary practice of cybervetting—the use of search en-

gines and social media platforms to evaluate jobseekers—highlights how information

previously considered to belong to the private realm is now also relevant in the public

work realm (Berkelaar and Buzzanell, 2015; McDonald etal., 2016; Berkelaar, 2017).

The case of cybervetting is especially interesting because it concerns not only the

boundaries between public and private realms but also issues of privacy. As online

interaction—communication, sharing and gathering of information—has affected our

understanding of the distinction between private and public realms, it has also af-

fected our notion of ‘privacy’ (cf. Solove, 2008; Trottier, 2012). Social media thus consti-

tute a ‘contested terrain’ where the separating lines between work and home, and

between public and private life are drawn and redrawn (McDonald and Thompson,

2016: 69; Van Zoonen etal., 2016). The urge to segregate the private and public realms

and the simultaneous difculty of keeping them separate lay the grounds for the kind

of boundary work that we focus on in this text.

Boundary work includes ‘the strategies, principles, and practices we use to create,

maintain, and modify cultural categories’ such as the division between home and work

(Nippert- Eng, 1996: 7). The term includes the processes through which we ascribe cer-

tain things and behaviours to either the public realm or the private realm, the strate-

gies we use to transfer from one realm to the other and our reconstructions of, and

negotiations about, what belongs to which realm. It is also the work we do when we

uphold norms based on distinctions such as what may be done in public or when

someone else’s private information may be gathered.

According to McDonald and Thompson (2016), we still ‘do not know enough about

how boundary changes in general, and the role of social media in particular, are per-

ceived and enacted by managers and workers’ (p. 81), and more empirical research is

needed to theorise how shifting boundaries relate to associated concepts, such as pri-

vacy. By researching recruiters’ use of cybervetting during recruitment processes, this

paper contributes empirical ndings on this topic. Our aim is to explore the various

ways in which cybervetting employers, hiring managers and recruiters construct and

reconstruct boundaries around the public–private division during the recruitment pro-

cess, and the potential consequences such boundary work has for recruiters, employ-

ees and jobseekers.

We consider the conceptions of recruiters to be of specic importance because la-

bour market laws offer jobseekers limited protection against cybervetting. In Sweden,

for example, job candidates are offered protection by anti- discrimination laws. Other

than that, employers are free to hire whoever suits them, and they may base their hir-

ing decisions purely on their (dis)like of a jobseeker rather than on the jobseeker’s

competencies. Compared with earlier methods, cybervetting facilitates recruiters’ ac-

cess to a different kind of information, such as information on family structure, leisure

time activities and communications of various kinds. Therefore, a common response to

cybervetting of jobseekers is that candidates must be careful what they post online.

However, to take care of an online persona, it is vital to understand when and how

employers seek information, as well as how they evaluate the information they nd.

By providing knowledge on employers’ (re)construction of private and public bound-

aries, we hope to generate interest in the question of what kind of information recruit-

ers’ selection decisions should be based on.