Controversial screening technique designed to ensure municipality hires workers with ‘highest moral character’
Workers looking for a job with the City of Bozeman are being asked to hand over passwords for social networking sites as part of the application process.
Bozeman, a city in Montana with a population of about 30,000, asks candidates to sign a waiver giving the city permission to conduct an investigation into the person’s “background, references, character, past employment, education, credit history, criminal or police records,” according to a report from KBZK television, the CBS affiliate for Bozeman.
It goes on to ask candidates to list “any and all current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.”
Then there are spaces for applicants to list applicable websites, usernames and passwords.
Greg Sullivan, Bozeman’s city attorney, told KBZK that the municipality takes privacy rights very seriously but said the policy balances those rights with the city’s need to ensure employees will protect the public trust.
“We have positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here,” said Sullivan. “So we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the city.”
Sullivan said the city isn’t using looking for anything that the “federal constitution lists as protected things.”
“We’re not putting out this broad brush stroke of trying to find out all kinds of information about the person that we’re not able to use or shouldn’t use in the hiring process,” he said.
KBZK became aware of the city’s hiring policy after an anonymous viewer who applied for employment sent the station an e-mail complaining about it.
