Recruiting & Unvarnished - A Lawsuit In The Making??
Posted by Paul Siker on Tue, Apr 27, 2010 @ 06:47 PM
While watching the evening news recently, I learned about a fascinating new website that will likely impact recruiters and the candidates they engage. The website is called Unvarnished (http://www.getunvarnished.com/).
According to the "About Us" page, "Unvarnished is an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation, using community-contributed, professional reviews. Unvarnished reviews help you get the inside scoop on other business professionals, providing candid assessments of coworkers, potential hires, business partners, and more."
Essentially, Unvarnished is a place where you can provide ratings on peers, superiors, subordinates, etc. What's interesting, of course, is that these ratings remain anonymous to anyone viewing them. To create a rating, you do need to register for Unvarnished via Facebook, which means that any rating that is published can be traced back to the author. This begs a really interesting question: How long will it take before someone files a suit against Unvarnished because they feel that a reviewers comments are libelous?
Of additional interest will be how the courts evaluate the applicability of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 as relates to reviews that are posted on Unvarnished. Section 230 of this law stipulates that the courts can't entertain claims that would place a computer service provider in a publisher's role, which means that if Unvarnished is deemed to be a distributor of negative posts, and not a publisher (i.e.: creator) - little can be done.
And, of course, we can only wonder how this service might be used or viewed by recruiters. If a recruiter finds a negative review or even a mediocre review of a prospective candidate or active candidate, what impact will this have? How long will it take for one individual to potentially "trash" a current or former colleague? Lots of questions, but we will have to wait to learn the answers. One thing for certain is that with the advent of Unvarnished, we see yet another illustration of how the internet continues to shape and impact the world of recruiting.