Should we have an industry wide blacklist to better evaluate job applicants?

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”

What do you think? Should companies seriously get together to attempt this? It would be good to get some thoughts from PSEB on this as well