Hiring Policies and Privacy

¶ … Employee Hiring Policies on Private Security Employee hiring policies can have an impact on the private security of a given business or company. One way in which private security is protected within a company or firm is via a hiring probation period.

A probation period can be useful in helping to determine the nature and the character of the person involved so that one can adequately determine the character of the person that one is dealing with and to see if this person can be considered to be adequately trustworthy: "Probation policies can help to increase the amount of time spent with the employee and teach an employer about different behaviors that the screening process may lack" (UofP, 2005).

Hiring policies need to protect the private security of a given business so that all can run smoothly and so that reliable employees are located: the more detailed the hiring policies and the more nuanced they are, the more overall effectiveness in securing quality employees. For example, no company wants to hire new staff members just to have them try to compromise private or confidential information.

Employees who have poor character or who are just interested in gathering confidential intelligence or files kept by an organization, need to be weeded out by the hiring process in general. However, this weeding out process needs to have strong record-keeping and other such documentation for it to work smoothly: or else prospective employees can easily sue on the grounds of discrimination. For instance, the case Desert Palace Inc. v.

Costa (2003) found that direct evidence need not even be presented by the plaintiff in order to win such a case which alleges discrimination. This means that an employee doesn't need to present hard evidence in order to prove discrimination. This also indicates that the burden is thus placed on the defendant, meaning that a strong paper trail which tracks all reasons why an employee wasn't hired and all security issues raised, needs to be detailed and well-documented. Hiring policies need to help reinforce the private security of an organization.

This means that there needs to be a range of physical and mental tests which will help bolster the quality of all employees. "Protection of classified information can result in a safer work environment. The main focus of policies is for control of internal employees within the work setting. Employers will also use different tools to help find the most suitable employees for the job at hand. There are different tools such as self-assessments, direct observations, work samples, and interviews that each individual will face before becoming an employee" (UofP, 2005).

Thus, hiring policies need to rely on things like the process of evaluation and assessment: this can help illuminate if employees will be able to engage in the necessary tasks in a trustworthy, reliable manner or if employers will need to find people with different traits. New employees needed to be treated as new for a long time, a least a year, even after the probation period has ended.

In this regard, all confidential information needs to be hidden from them and to be rendered completely inaccessible, until they have been with the company for at least a year. In that sense, the information will inaccessible until the employee has proven that they are qualified and trustworthy enough to protect it. On the other hand, there are a wealth of court cases which demonstrate that hiring polices which are in place to protect the so-called private security of a company, can actually be discriminatory.

For example, the 1971 case Griggs vs. Duke Power Co. ruled that the company's hiring requirements for certain upper level positions actually had no impact on how well the employee would be able to perform the job, and were in fact discriminatory to prevent blacks from elevating themselves to higher levels. Thus, while Duke Power Company may have argued that these hiring policies (such as the IQ test) were necessary to insure a high quality caliber employee and to protect private security, others argued that these policies reflected straight-up discrimination.

Also, when it comes to protecting private security, there absolutely need to be different enforcement policies in place for the proper response to the different situations: the company needs to demonstrate that they mean business in regards to protecting their privacy. For example, this can result in early termination or other disciplines actions for a given company. However, a company needs to be extremely specific about why an employee is being terminated or why employment is being refused or not offered.

In this litigious day and age, a company needs to have clear, specific reasons why an employer is not going to hire someone, and those reasons need to be valid and well documented. For example, in the case Gonzalez vs. Abercrombie and Fitch Stores, "The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, charged that in addition to selling so-called "classic" looks, Abercrombie also practiced a classic form of discrimination against African-American, Latino and Asian-American applicants and employees.

The suit alleged that Abercrombie refused to hire qualified minority applicants as Brand Representatives working on the sales floor while discouraging applications from minority candidates. It also charged that in the rare instances when minorities were hired, they were.