Pros and Cons of removing personal information
Identify the pros and cons of removing personal information, such as age, gender, ethnic origin, and family or marital circumstances, prior to
the screening and short listing of applicants for employment. Take a position for either removing or retaining such information.
The following conditions must meet in the paper
1) I want a typical and a quality answer which should have about 830 words.
2) The answer must raise appropriate critical questions.
3) The answer must include examples from experience or the web with references from
relevant examples from real companies.
4) Do include all your references, as per the Harvard Referencing System,
5) Please don�t use Wikipedia web site.
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Every employee has personal information with regards to age, ethnic origin, gender, and
marital status that can possibly be captured, or left out prior to screening and shortlisting of
employment application. Removing or retaining personal information has possible implications
that should adequately be considered during shortlisting.
Mollick (2010) argues thatthe removal of the personal information helps a person to have
maximum privacy in accordance to the FreedomAct and thePrivacy Act thatforbids a company
from releasing an employee’s personal information.Some information like the payroll
information in the case of federal agencies is exempted from the public disclosure and this can
only happen when a person has declared his information to be released to the public (Iannarelli &
O’Shaughnessy, 2014).The failure not to assess the employee’s personal information makesthem
have a complete trust on their employer since they are sure that such information will not be used
in a biased manner against them. Most employees are free to release their personal information to
their employers but they would not wish that this information be used against them for
discrimination purposes in their workplace. In a case where trust is lost, employees tend swift to
places where they are treated better such that their personal information is not necessary for
employment purposes. Some people fail to avail their personal information since they think by
doing that they will have invaded their personal liberty andthis helps them not to revealtheir
background checks totheiremployer. A mistake done in the youth may affect a person in that they
don’t get a certain joband if they do not disclose their personal information to their employees
they secure the job at hand. Over the year, people have been discriminated in their workplace due
to ethnic origin, religion, gender, and background. Concealing such personal information is the
only chance that can help reduce such forms of discrimination.
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The removal of personal information is useful sinceit helps one not tobeableto sell
another person’sinformation to unscrupulous persons that may use such information in
unnecessary means. In the case of personal property like the driving licenses, it is important not
to give such personal information to the employerfor easy retrieval incase such documents get
lost. Not disclosing personal information helps victims to be able to protect themselves fromthe
thief’s who have intentions of hacking their systems or acquiring property from them through
unauthorized means.The ability not to disclose personal information’s helps one to be sure that
his information is not being misused or even it is not compromised by organizations or their
employers for their own benefits and not issues related to their duties. Thorough background
checkup protects the employers not to have problems in their future lawsuits with their employer.
It is advisable to have a specific person who receives company office calls since it is
good to have one person who is trusted in safeguarding employee’s information (Blanpain,
2014). On the other hand, background checks are very expensive in terms of money since most
employers tend not to carry thorough checks on the people they are about to employsince its
highly expensive to do so.Litigation is evident in most companies since they failed to carry
enough background check on the people they wereemploying, a good case example isWal-Mart,
which wasinvolved in the negligence lawsuit in matters related to employees personal
information (Teevan & Jones, 2006). The employer can highly be penalized by not dealing with
private information or data that is provided to him in irresponsible manner and this may bring
problems on the side of the employee. Carelessness of losing personal information may lead to
heavy fines which may make the employers be compromised by the court to pay them.The
company that gets access to personal information or even thedoings of those persons and fails to
handle itwellmay find itself in problems if such information wasto getinto the wrong hands;
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hencethey need to be very sensitive on such information.According to Charters (2005), the
extensive backgroundchecks carried out by company employers may be very crucial to a
person’s livelihoodand this explains why companies should not make errors while performing
background checks.Terrorist attacks have contributed to the result of high security check since it
is hard to get a job without undergoing serious security check for the employer tobesure of the
type of aperson he is dealing with.
However, disclosing the personal information of the employees also has some benefits
(Iannarelli & O’Shaughnessy, 2014). Disclosing such personal information helps the HR
department to prove to the management and the general public that they are fair in their
recruitment and that all the demographic groups are incorporated. This is highly important in
cosmopolitan zones and ethnically mixed population, whereby any form of discrimination is
highly sensitive. In addition, displaying personal information enables the HR department to plan
for necessary adjustments with the aim of ensuring that all the demographic groups are
represented. A particular demographic group can be good in doing a particular task within the
organization and thus, such personal information can be used by HR for their employee
placement.
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References
Blanpain, R.2014. Protection of Employees’ Personal Information and Privacy.Wolters Kluwer
Law & Business
Charters, D. 2005.Managing employee personal information.CMA Management. Vol. 79 Issue 2,
p14-15
Iannarelli, J. & O’Shaughnessy, M. 2014.Information Governance and Security: Protecting and
Managing Your Company Proprietary Information.Butterworth-Heinemann, 1edition
Mollick, J.S. 2010.Determinants of perceived trustworthiness in managing personal
information.International Journal of the Academic Business World. Vol. 4 Issue 1, p19-
28
Teevan, J. &Jones, W.2006.Personal Information Management.Communications of the ACM.
Vol. 49 Issue 1, p40-43
