2019

Under the terms of a proposed class action settlement, 7-Eleven will establish a settlement fund of $1,972,500 to compensate about 60,000 job applicants who claimed that the company violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) when it failed to provide a “standalone” notice of background checks.

The hearing for preliminary approval is scheduled for July 15. Although the convenience store chain does not admit any wrongdoing, it has agreed to settle the claims to avoid the risks and costs of continuing to litigate the issue.
 

Until recently, Russian legislation did not include administrative sanctions for companies who violate data protection requirements.

However, new legislation introduced will propose fines for first offenses between $30,000 – $90,000. Repeated offenses may be punishable by fines between $90,000 – $280,000. Data protection requirements were introduced in 2015 in the Russian Law on Personal Data. The requirements call for mandatory obligation for all operators of personal data to ensure the safe recording, systematization, accumulation, storage, amendment and extraction of personal data for Russian citizens.
 
 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rising trend within the recruitment industry. Whether you are an in-house or an agency recruiter, your success is dependent on quickly and effectively identifying, engaging and ultimately, hiring the best possible candidates. AI recruitment tools are often used to reduce hiring bias in instances where a human recruiter may be prone to unconscious bias. These tools are also believed to improve processes, making them more efficient and overall, they are seen to enhance the recruitment industry.   

However, issues can arise when the human element of recruitment is removed, as Amazon found out to their cost.  Amazon’s AI tool automatically discounted female applicants for technical and developer roles.  While Amazon cannot be fully blamed - the tool used 10 years’ worth of recruitment patterns within the tech industry, which is typically male-dominated - the lack of human intervention made it a costly mistake as the tool had taken over a year to develop.

More recently, LinkedIn has been criticised for its use of recruitment chatbots. A nonsense LinkedIn profile was created to see if something fishy was going on with their automated recruitment tool.

Despite living in an underwater pineapple, and bearing a profile picture of a fish, ‘Mr. Sea Bream’ was offered a job due to his “impressive background” in software development.

Such cases only highlight the importance of the human element in the recruitment industry.  As Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster who became the first world champion to lose to a computer when IBM’s Deep Blue beat him in 1997, argues “a human with a machine would always beat the strongest machine”.  After all, the industry is led by people for people, and a recruiter’s role is to build relationships that are focused on human-to-human interactions.  At Verifile, we’re committed to ensuring that every one of your employees is everything they claim to be and nothing fishy is going on. Trained humans are checking every single case we verify, and often more than one individual reviews each case.