The city of Bozeman, Montana, requires job candidates to list their social networking sites, usernames, and passwords on the city employee application. City Attorney Greg Sullivan explained that the city has “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. 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.” No prospective employee has yet to remove his/her name because of the requirement. Yet, with such high access to a prospect’s profile, it could become difficult for human resources to not be aware of a candidate’s ethnicity or even religious affiliation.
Has the city justified its decision to ask for this information? Would you be comfortable if a prospective employer asked you for this information? Why or why not?