I found this post online regarding suggesting Employers should share an employee black list online. I thought it was interesting and wanted to share. My question is what if one is out there and has your name on it. How would you feel?

Call this the evil post of the day.

Every company has its share of horror stories with regards to hiring and professional employees. We provide training solutions on professionalism so we know the kind of painful unprofessional employees our IT industry deals with.

Despite following structured interviewing techniques, we have still stacked up our list of people to just not consider again.

The question is: Shouldn’t there be a way for the entire IT industry to “post” their blacklists into a common pool so all of the HR departments can share within themselves?

Think about the benefits for a second: I can goto a website, enter an NIC and get an immediate history of the candidate and his comments from other employers. For candidates, they could only swindle a company once or twice, because after that we would just know he wouldn’t be able to do anything.

There are other types of issues they can solve as well. Currently, the way companies opt to build some insurance for their hiring is to (1) ask for transcripts / job letters from previous employers and (2) check references. The basic reasons this is not an effective method is (1) Most Work Experience letters are too general (2) If I need someone desperately, I may not care too much about whether his basic credentials hold up

However, if some applicant burned me, wasted my time, worked for a week and stole things (that has actually happened with colleagues), then I would certainly ensure that I write this into the central blacklist so that atleast other companies dont have to suffer this fate.

I think there would be two different ways of approaching this:

1- Make it community driven

I may not want to know what company XYZ thought about a candidate because I could be in an unrelated field (e.g. Call Centers to Product Dev). But I would care who my trusted circle of colleagues have come across and are warning me about.

So perhaps we can have a way for groups of companies to form small networks where they can share their lists. This could make the system self balancing and protect companies from vandalism — if I invite someone into the group, then I am somewhat responsible for that person’s actions..

2- Make it completely anonymous.

Dont give me the company names, or the candidate names. Let me search on an NIC number, and give me completely anonymous comments from other companies. Then give my company a password to the system only if I register on PSEB.

There are some issues with things like this, where evil HR Managers could vandalise the system by, e.g. putting up their boss in the blacklist in case they’re having a bad day (yes, that has happened!)

But I think if the system is decentralized (as in #1 above), and you let people only maintain blacklists with small trusted groups, then this can be solved. See I would be able to detect any anomalies in the system much better than the system or service provider (e.g. PSEB) could, since I would know the other people in the group.

The overall question is: Is it fair on these poor candidates trying to make a living, to not give them another chance and stop their entire career based on minor mistakes?

From my perspective, yes. As much as we would like we are not charitable organizations — business is business, and I would rather protect the business of my partners because of someone who disrupts mine. Ofcourse, there would also need to be some good way of adding positive feedback about that employee as well to add the element of “giving another chance”

www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/holiday-systems-international-c103310.html

This is my response to this.  It works both ways.  There could be legitimate reasons to black list a potential employee, but the other side of this coin is there are also bad companies out there too!  If this above company were allowed to black list employees how much damage could this cause for innocent people?  I worked for this company all of 7 days before I could not take it anymore.  Please read everything on this board because there are replies from the company itself.  When companies like this are allowed to continue in business and treat their employees this way, giving them the opportunity to black list you is horrible!  Most everything you read here I can vouch for that I either heard or witnessed myself while employeed there.  I would not want them to have the ablitity to put me on a blacklist because I stood up for myself and decided I was not going to be treated this way.

It seems with today's economy the way it is, more and more employers are taking way too much advantage of their employees with the notion in mind that if you don't want to put up with the crap, there are a lot of unemployed people out there that will.

article 3 part 2

Set up by Surrey-based firm Hicom Business Solutions, the database will allow employers to search for potential workers by name, address, date of birth, national insurance number and previous employer.

Records on individuals - accessible online via an encrypted password system - will be kept for a five-year period and can include photos.

Mike Schuck, chief executive of AABC, says that theft by members of staff costs the British economy billions of pounds each year and rejects the notion that the register is a blacklist.

He says that all participating companies will be obliged to abide by the Data Protection Act and that workers named on the database, maintained by AABC, will have the right to change their entries if they are inaccurate.

Should a dispute take place between an employee and an employer about whether an incident occurred, Mr Schuck adds, the worker will be able to appeal to the Information Commissioner's Office.

"We are limiting access to the database to employers who can comply with the Information Commissioner's employment practices code," he says. "We're not going to allow Mr Smith's hardware store. We're quite open about this. People will be told when they apply for jobs that they may be checked as part of the application process.

"Theft in the workplace hurts staff as much as employers because it puts everyone under suspicion."

Nonetheless, many workers may get a nasty surprise when old allegations return to haunt them when they next apply for a job.

not good.

Whether there is a database or not, the practice is as old as the network and it's implementation can be relatively untraceable.  As long as you have angry unforgiving people, moody people, honory people, liars, jealous vindictive people who will do anything to prevent someone that they know is better than them from getting ahead, racist people, religious bigots and people who just generally get up on the wrong side of the bed, oh yeah, and the truly guilty - YOU WILL HAVE BLACKLISTING.  Sometimes life is not fair, take the lemons and make lemonade.  In the end, the liars will get theirs, the angry unforgiving will get theirs, in short, live by the Blacklist, die by the blacklist.  Wasn't Bill Gates blacklisted???  LOL