An Administrator's Guide to California Private School Law

Chapter 3 – Hiring

 Access without notice to the job applicant, but provide the applicant with an opportunity to respond to questions concerning online information;  Access without notice and provide no opportunity for the applicant to respond; or  Not access the online information at all.

The school should apply a uniform approach as to each applicant for whom it conducts a background check to avoid possible claims that the school treated certain applicants less favorably for discriminatory reasons. While information found on public sites on the Internet is readily available to anyone, schools should exercise caution in relying on this information. Information found on the Internet may not accurately reflect the qualities or capacities of the applicant in question. In recent years, for example, reports abound of false information posted about individuals on the Internet either out of spite or merely as a joke. In addition, even if the information is true or accurate, it may not be pertinent to the applicant’s qualifications for the position. Moreover, schools must be careful not to consider information found on the Internet that the employer may not legally consider in screening applicants. For example, social networking sights might provide information about an applicant’s protected status such as the applicant’s age, race, marital status, or similar information – information that a school may not consider when making hiring decisions. Accordingly, when schools consider online sources of information, schools should be careful to ensure that: (1) the information found is true and reliable; (2) the information is pertinent to the applicant’s ability to perform the job; and (3) the information falls into a category that the school may legally elicit from the applicant during the application process. The California Labor Code prohibits employers from requiring or requesting that an employee or applicant for employment: (1) disclose a username or password for the purpose of accessing personal social media; (2) access personal social media in the presence of the employer; or (3) divulge any personal social media. 129 LCW Practice Advisor Schools should also consider having someone who is not making the hiring decision conduct the search of public sources and remove any information that is not relevant to the qualifications for the position. 3. C ONTACT I NDIVIDUALS W HO A CTUALLY S UPERVISED A PPLICANT To obtain objective and useful information, background investigators should contact individuals who actually supervised applicants rather than friends of the applicants. This is so because job applicants tend to provide only the names of individuals who will provide positive comments about them. Also, applicants often identify as references individuals with whom they never worked. In contrast, direct supervisors, school division heads, and mentors generally have personal knowledge and insight on how applicants perform on a daily basis and respond to stress

An Administrator’s Guide to California Private School Law ©2019 Liebert Cassidy Whitmore 59