Complete the reading: Coutu, D. (2007). We Googled You. Harvard Business Review, 85, 37-41. Reference key ideas in this journal

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HBR CASE STUDY

HE WIND WAS HOWLING and relentless as Fred Westen opened the door and called upstairs to tell his wife that he was home. While he waited for her to come down, he poured himself a shot of whiskey, tilting the decanter with his left hand. In his right he grasped the morning’s Wall Street Journal. The CEO of the luxury apparel retailer Hathaway Jones wanted to hear his wife’s reaction to a story.

Martha Westen walked almost languorously down the stairs. She went to the kitchen, poured herself a cup of tea, strolled into the living room, and nestled in her favorite chair by the fi re. Fred handed her the paper and directed her attention to the front page. There she found an article about how an insurer had rejected a woman’s claim for disability because of chronic back pain, based on information the company had obtained from her psychologist’s notes.

Martha shook her head. “It gets worse every day,” she shud- dered as she envisioned a future in which everyone’s medical records were posted online. “Even our thoughts aren’t private anymore.” At 58, Martha didn’t pretend to be an expert on shared

We Googled You Hathaway Jones’s CEO has found a promising candidate to open the company’s fl agship store in Shanghai. Should a revelation on the Internet disqualify her now?

by Diane Coutu

T

HBR’s cases, which are fi ctional, present common managerial dilemmas and offer concrete solutions from experts.

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online content or anything else to do with the Internet. All her information was limited to what she read in the popular press.

Which was just enough to keep her up at night.

“It’s what I keep on telling you, Fred. There are no secrets now, and we’re just going to have to learn how to live with that.”

Martha fell silent, staring moodily at the fl ickering fi re. Fred was almost relieved when the telephone rang. He jumped up to grab the receiver.

At the other end of the line was John Brewster, Fred’s old roommate at Andover and now a stringer for a num- ber of U.S. newspapers in Shanghai. Although the two had not stayed close after prep school, they still exchanged Christmas letters and called each other occasionally. The men spent a few min- utes catching up and then John eased the conversation around to his daugh- ter, Mimi.

Now in San Francisco, Mimi had heard that Fred planned to expand the Philadelphia-based Hathaway Jones into China, and she wanted to be part of the move. Fred hadn’t seen her since she was a teenager, but he remembered her as poised and precocious in the way that expatriate kids often are. John asked Fred if he would meet with her.

“She’s a terrifi c gal,” his old friend prom- ised, “a real mover and shaker.”

“I look forward to seeing her again,” Fred said honestly. “Just have her con- tact my assistant.”

The Candidate A month later, on the other side of the country, Mimi Brewster was admir- ing herself in the bedroom mirror. As she stared at her refl ection, a trace of a smile brightened her face. It wasn’t a smile that Mimi would let everyone see, but it communicated the satisfaction she felt with her life. With her bobbed black hair and Manolo Blahnik shoes,

Mimi felt that she was right on track. Not quite 30, she was already the kind of person who made people sit up and take notice.

“You look terrifi c; he’ll be as wild about you as I am,” Mimi’s boyfriend, Chandler, said as he rolled over in bed, unable to hide his continuing infatu- ation with Mimi. “He’d be nuts not to hire you.”

Mimi agreed with Chandler. She had grown up in China, and she spoke both Mandarin and a local dialect. Al- though she had been an average stu- dent, her profi le had won her admis- sion to some top colleges, including two Ivy League schools. She eventually plumped for Berkeley, where her fa- ther had gone. There she’d majored in modern Chinese history and graduated cum laude.

She had parlayed her college experi- ence into numerous job offers, fi nally accepting a position at a management consultancy, where she got the broad business exposure she wanted. Her ca- reer in motion, she applied to an MBA program two years later, choosing Stanford over Harvard because she felt that it was closer to the buzz. She was recruited after graduation by the West Coast regional offi ce of Eleanor Gaston, the largest clothing, shoes, and acces- sories company in the United States. There, for the past four years, she’d shown a sharp eye for the capricious fashion tastes of the young, newly rich people in search of something to do with their dot-com money. Now, with two successful brand relaunches behind her, she was looking for some general management experience, preferably in a fast-growing market like China.

Mimi walked over to the bed, sat down, and kissed Chandler playfully on the lips. “Don’t waste the day chatting

with your Facebook friends,” she told him. “You’ve got to take Patapouf to the vet.” Mimi’s Siamese cat was famously ill-tempered, but he had attitude, and Mimi warmed to that. She picked up Patapouf and gave him a hug.

Abruptly, she stood, straightened her Hathaway Jones interview suit, and said good-bye. All business now, she grabbed her bag, her BlackBerry, and her keys and ran out to catch the fl ight to Philadelphia.

Bullish on a China Shop Fred left the house at 5:30 am every day for his offi ce at 1 Constitution Road. He had a lot of work to do, and there was not a moment to waste. Despite sales of $5 billion in 2006, Hathaway Jones had fallen on hard times. Four years ago, the privately owned U.S. retail chain had recruited Fred because of his imposing credentials and a lifetime’s experience of working with luxury brands and had charged him with wak- ing up the company’s sleepy, conserva- tive stores.

It hadn’t been easy. Though aggres- sive outsourcing to suppliers in Mex- ico for some of the chain’s lower-tier brands had helped bring the company’s margins closer to industry standards, that was just a start. An avid con- sumer of his fi rm’s marketing research, Fred knew that the company’s image was getting old fast. Younger people across the United States, where Hatha- way Jones had 144 shops and outlets, wanted more affordable clothing, with more fl air. The trend was starting to show up in declining numbers for the company’s high-priced – some said stodgy – designer clothes. Plans for rad- ically revamping the company’s image and product line were in the offi ng.

Fred’s biggest bet, however, was to el- bow in on China’s luxury goods market, which was growing by 70% a year. He had earmarked millions of dollars to open new stores in three of the largest cities, including Beijing and Guangzhou, with the fl agship in Shanghai, China’s wealthiest and most cosmopolitan city.

Diane Coutu ([email protected] ) is a senior editor at HBR.

“ It gets worse every day. Even our thoughts aren’t private anymore.”

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With the plans in place, Fred was fo- cused on selecting a winning team. “I wonder what Mimi’s like now?” he asked himself, eyeing her CV. “Maybe there’s a way I can fi t her in. Doing a friend a favor and banking on a ris- ing star – who knows? This could be a twofer.”

The First Impression Mimi was Fred’s last appointment of the day. “C’mon in!” he boomed, em- bracing her and inviting her to take a seat on the couch. Mimi looked around the corner suite and glanced at a litho- graph of Hathaway Jones’s fi rst store, a draper’s shop in Philadelphia. “You’re the spitting image of your mother,” Fred said, settling into his soft leather chair. “Tell me how she’s doing.”

Mimi relayed how after almost 30 years of painting portraits, her mother had taken up fashion photography to capitalize on China’s unprecedented interest in image and celebrity. “It’s amazing how much appetite the new middle class has for fashion,” Mimi com- mented. “Right,” Fred said, adding that Chuppies – China’s yuppies – couldn’t seem to get their hands on luxury goods quickly enough. “Absolutely!” she said, a little too abruptly. “Every- body knows that.”

Mimi fi shed around for insights that would make a smart impression on Fred. She knew that on the face of it, China seemed to be all about money. “But if you talk to senior executives in the big cities,” she reported intelligently, “Con- fucianism comes up in every conversa- tion.” She said that the Chinese wanted to balance the intense materialism of the past two decades with some kind of spirituality and that Fred had better be prepared to deal with it.

Mimi looked him squarely in the eye. Clearly, she wasn’t expecting a handout. She wanted to be part of Hathaway Jones’s plans to expand into China be- cause she felt she deserved to be part of those plans. Indeed, she hoped to lead the team opening the fl agship store on Nanjing Road – Shanghai’s version

of Fifth Avenue. “A store is more than just the look and feel of a brand,” she said knowingly. “It’s a woman’s fashion fantasy. I can help you create a fantasy to die for.” Mimi talked about using an- cient Chinese archetypes to bring the company’s brand alive, and Fred was in- trigued by the pitch. “I’ll open the door for you and arrange some interviews,” he said noncommittally, “but after that, you’re on your own.”

Mimi winked. “Thanks, boss,” she said, turning on her heel, confi dent that she was going to be a player at Hatha- way Jones.

Page Nine News Virginia Flanders, the vice president of human resources, was a lifer at Hatha- way Jones, and as a member of the old guard, she had not been invited into Fred’s inner circle. Indeed, the two of them had been at loggerheads about the way Fred brought together his top team. He ignored internal talent and downplayed the value of HR, relying overmuch, Virginia thought, on his sixth sense about who were the right people to bring on board. It was typi- cal of the man, she refl ected, that Fred spoke glowingly about Mimi after just one interview.

As she put together a fi le on Mimi for the staff, Virginia had to concede that the candidate’s letters of recom- mendation were impressive. Employers described her as aggressively creative, original, opinionated, and a risk taker – perhaps a bit brash for Hathaway Jones, Virginia thought. She rounded out the fi le by running a routine Google search on Mimi. The fi rst hits turned up a res- taurant owner who shared Mimi’s name. Virginia narrowed the search by adding a few parameters – Berkeley, Stanford, and Mimi’s employer.

It was Virginia’s practice to scan the fi rst 11 pages of Google results, and on page nine she glimpsed something that might cause concern. A story in the November 1999 issue of the Alterna- tive Review identifi ed Mimi, fresh out of Berkeley, as the leader of a nonviolent

but vocal protest group that had helped mobilize campaigns against the World Trade Organization.

“That’s odd,” Virginia mused, deciding to key in “human rights” and “free trade” along with Mimi’s name. She didn’t ex- pect to fi nd much, but the search en- gine came up with several hits. It was soon clear that Mimi’s involvement had been more than just a student’s expression of defi ance. One newspaper story featured a photo of Mimi sitting outside China’s San Francisco consulate protesting China’s treatment of a dis- sident journalist.

Virginia had just clicked on another entry when a pop-up notifi ed her of an e-mail from Fred, canceling their meeting for later that day. Groaning inwardly, Virginia typed a short mes- sage and hit the reply button. She was going to have to talk with Fred about this straightaway.

Ex Post Facebook Fred was in the boardroom wrapping up a meeting with the senior execu- tive team; Virginia waited a few mo- ments, then walked in. He knew her well enough to see that whatever she had to say to him wasn’t going to make him happy. “What’s the problem, Vir- ginia?” he asked as he snapped his binder shut.

“I’m afraid we have something of a situation on our hands,” she began, priding herself on her ability to remain objective. “I’ve been Googling Mimi Brewster, and I think there’s some- thing we might need to worry about.” Virginia showed Fred printouts of the half-dozen or so articles she had found. Choosing her words carefully, she pointed out that Mimi could be the kind of person who could get the com- pany into trouble in China.

“For heaven’s sake,” Fred said, betray- ing his irritation. “Google anyone hard enough, and you’ll fi nd some dirt.” Pri- vately, however, Fred was relieved that Virginia hadn’t turned up anything more recent than eight years ago – and even more relieved that it wasn’t a pic-

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ture of Mimi half naked on MySpace, which could really embarrass Hatha- way Jones.

Fred’s mind moved back in time, re- membering the 1960s. “Let’s face it,” he thought a little defensively, he’d “not inhaled” just like the rest of his friends. Suddenly he felt a touch of paranoia – or was it realism? He couldn’t tell.

“Let’s get Mimi back in here to tell her side of the story,” he said, looking up at Virginia. He knew enough about the Internet to understand that anyone could put information out there.

Virginia blinked anxiously and sug- gested that Fred might fi rst want to get some feedback from the company lawyers. She explained that they were studying the legal and privacy impli- cations of Internet searching practices in an attempt to defi ne an appropriate

position for the company. “It’s a bit risky letting her know that we’re consider- ing not hiring her because we Googled her,” Virginia pointed out. “It might be safer just to back away before we get too involved.”

“Maybe,” Fred conceded, acknowl- edging that he might need to rethink Mimi’s candidacy. “But people with her credentials and references don’t walk in the door of a company like ours ev- ery day. If she’s swept up by the compe- tition, there’ll be hell to pay.”

The Decision Point “Watch out!” Martha shouted as Fred ignored a yield sign and veered toward an oncoming car.

Martha and Fred were heading out for dinner in the city, but Fred’s mind was a million miles away. “What’s the matter?” she asked, trying not to sound intrusive. “Is it something we can discuss?”

Fred put on his blinker to signal that he was turning left. He told Mar- tha what HR had turned up about Mimi. “What am I supposed to do?” he brooded. “With everyone’s sins out there on the Internet, fewer and fewer young people seem to be coming to us without any baggage.” He turned on the car’s defroster and loosened his tie.

“Everyone is going to have to be a little more forgiving,” he said.

Martha was quiet for a few min- utes as she tried to process the news. She didn’t think anyone was going to just forgive and forget. “Internet post- ings are like tattoos,” she said, ending the short silence. “They never go away. Sooner or later someone else will dig up this information, and if the wrong people get hold of it, your China plans will be derailed.”

Fred quickly glanced at her in surprise. He’d expected Martha to insist that he hire Mimi despite the discoveries.

Martha grew impatient with Fred’s naïveté. The genie was out of the bottle now. He needed to put business consid- erations ahead of any hesitation he felt about using information that turned up on the Internet.

Fred looked away from Martha and turned the windshield wipers on high. Snow was falling fast and hard, and Fred felt strangely alone. “I don’t know,” he thought, fl ipping the argument back and forth. “The problem is that I have a responsibility to Hathaway Jones to hire the best people I can fi nd. And how am I going to do that if I can only con- sider the ones who have always played it safe?”

Should Fred hire Mimi despite her online history? Four commentators offer expert advice beginning on page 42.

“ People with her credentials and references don’t walk in the door of a company like ours every day. If she’s swept up by the competition, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“If you don’t get the magazine from the Rotman School of Management, aptly called Rotman, you’re making a mistake.”

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HBR CASE COMMENTARY | Should Fred Hire Mimi Despite Her Online History?

RED WESTEN should certainly follow his instinct and hire Mimi Brewster if every- thing else checks out. He should talk to her and tell her exactly what has come up. He has little to lose. There’s no legal reason to fear searching the Internet for information about your job applicants – an issue arises only if you unlawfully discriminate against someone because of what you fi nd. And if CEOs are looking only for people who are total saints, and who never did anything that made it onto the Web, then maybe they’re hiring only un- interesting people at the end of the day. A strategy of that sort could backfi re terribly: If you have nobody with chutzpah in your group, you will fi nd yourself hurting for leaders.

There may also be another side to the story discovered by the human resources depart- ment. Digital information is extremely mal- leable. Anyone with a tiny bit of expertise can easily falsify it – for example, by anonymously lying about someone in a chat room and start- ing a rumor that catches fi re and becomes a

“truth.” Fallacious remarks travel very, very quickly online – perhaps even faster than true information – and it is hard to track them down and expunge them. So if something that may or may not be true about a candidate is raised, it is essential to bring that person in to clarify the situation. You might also want

to ask them to provide more references for you to check. Because online information is so easily falsifi ed – and, plainly, so easily shared – this second level of interviewing has become increasingly important.

Presumably, Mimi didn’t call up newspa- pers and ask them to write articles about her. But in the culture of “digital natives,” there’s often an intention to be public. People raised in the modern computing environment share information much more promiscuously than previous generations have. They have a cer-

tain devil-may-care attitude toward things that other people would probably consider highly private – compromising photos, embarrass- ing conversations, and other activities that they otherwise wouldn’t want their mothers to know – and they don’t think twice about revealing them online. That’s not going to change unless there’s a radical course cor- rection in social norms.

Given the trend, hiring standards will have to change, or you just won’t be able to hire great people. That’s hard for the current crop of CEOs and HR executives to understand. Most senior executives are “digital immi- grants” who have not immersed themselves in the electronic culture. Baby boomers, and sometimes younger executives, are trying to work through their ambivalence toward the current generation of 20 -somethings, who increasingly put negative information about themselves online. The primary diffi culty for digital immigrants is that they’re fi ghting against their own instinct, which is to pull the trigger on the digital natives. The generation gap will continue to widen until the digital natives become CEOs and HR executives themselves.

I don’t have a crystal ball, so I can’t tell whether the current revolution is going to turn out to be permanent or not. My guess

is that we’re headed for a really big backlash at some point – there are going to be train wrecks as people who post too much per- sonal information online begin to realize the consequences. When they have to explain to their kids why naked pictures of themselves at age 25 are on the Internet, some digital na- tives will have real regrets. That said, I don’t think those conversations will necessarily dif- fer much from the ones that people who grew up in the 1960s had to have with their kids about drugs and free love.

The primary diffi culty for digital immigrants is that they’re fi ghting against their own instinct, which is to pull the trigger on the digital natives.

John G. Palfrey, Jr., (jpalfrey @law.harvard.edu) is a clinical professor of law and the exec- utive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is also a founder of RSS Investors. He writes a blog at http://blogs.law.harvard .edu/palfrey/.

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HBR CASE COMMENTARY | Should Fred Hire Mimi Despite Her Online History?

Today, qualifi ed candidates can be Googled out of contention for a job before they even get a foot in the door for an interview.

HE EVOLUTION of online media and social networking is changing the em-

ployment landscape in many subtle but fun- damental ways, which most employers and candidates are only beginning to understand fully and manage effectively. One of these shifts is the practice of informally conducting at least partial online background checks of individuals prior to interviewing them.

Traditionally, a background check was not done until after an applicant had gone through a gauntlet of interviews and been selected as a fi nalist. And it wasn’t long ago that some- one with an imperfect past could move far away from his troubled history and start fresh in a new location. Today, qualifi ed candidates can be Googled out of contention for a job before they even get a foot in the door for an interview, and it’s diffi cult for them to leave their baggage behind even when crossing national borders, because the online commu- nity knows no boundaries.

In this case, Fred and his HR manager have taken some initial steps in the hiring process and uncovered some red fl ags that would cause me to sideline Mimi as a candidate for the Shanghai position. Beyond the discon- certing online revelation, former employers describe her as opinionated and brash, and in the interview with Fred, it seemed quite inappropriate for her to wink at him and call him “boss” on the way out of his offi ce. If the job for which Mimi was interviewing were in a Western country, these concerns might not be as big a deal, but China is a unique place.

Although Mimi has some strong qualifi ca- tions, her background in China is not enough to make her a good manager there. Hathaway Jones is opening its fi rst store in Shanghai, and the fi rm needs a manager who can build a constructive relationship with the local gov- ernment. Hiring someone without the right skills and attitudes to do so could hinder the company’s ability to succeed in this market.

And, of course, the fact that Chinese people are very Web oriented and know how to Google probably wouldn’t help her situation.

Frankly, because retail and service busi- nesses are so local in nature, I would hesitate to put an expatriate in the Shanghai position. Chinese employees expect their leaders to be modest and humble and see them as highly respected authority fi gures with parentlike attributes. A Western-style leader who doesn’t understand this will face high turnover rates and low productivity levels. For all her language skills, Mimi does not strike me as a credible parent substitute for a Chi- nese workforce.

This case illustrates how important it is for potential employees – particularly young people who spend a great deal of time engag- ing in all sorts of Web 2.0 activities – to pro- tect their reputations and think twice about the online personae they are presenting to the world. Information posted today will still

be available years from now and could come back to haunt them. Many new high school and college graduates don’t truly understand this until they are sitting in a job interview and the HR manager opens a fi le that includes not only their résumé but also their latest blog entries and party photos. Online content is public information, and it is fair game for em- ployers to ask about it.

We always recommend that candidates search the Internet to fi nd anything about themselves that might come up in an inter- view, so that they can prepare to respond effectively. They should consider how they might use the Web to demonstrate attri- butes that would make a positive impression on potential employers. Better to fi ll the In- ternet with content that portrays you as an accomplished and capable individual who would be an asset to a new employer than to share the details from your latest weekend adventures.

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Jeffrey A. Joerres (chief .executive.offi [email protected] .com) is the chairman and CEO of Manpower, an employment services company headquar- tered in Milwaukee.

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HBR CASE COMMENTARY | Should Fred Hire Mimi Despite Her Online History?

danah m. boyd ([email protected] ischool.berkeley.edu) is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and an adviser to major media corporations. She maintains a blog at www.zephoria.org/thoughts/.

If Hathaway Jones doesn’t want to hire people like Mimi, it’ll miss out on the best minds of my generation.

JUST CELEBRATED my ten-year blogging anniversary. I started blogging when I was

19, and before that, I regularly posted to public mailing lists, message boards, and Usenet. I grew up with this technology, and I’m part of the generation that should be embarrassed by what we posted. But I’m not – those posts are part of my past, part of who I am. I look back at the 15-year-old me, and I think, “My, you were foolish.” Many of today’s teens will also look back at the immaturity of their teen years and giggle uncomfortably. Over time, foolish digital pasts will simply become part of the cultural fabric.

Young people today are doing what young people have always done: trying to fi gure out who they are. By putting themselves in pub- lic for others to examine, teens are working through how others’ impressions of them align with their self-perceptions. They adjust their behavior and attitudes based on the

reactions they get from those they respect. Today’s public impression management is taking place online.

Once again, adults are upset by how the younger generation is engaging with new cul- tural artifacts; this time, it’s the Internet. As with all moral panics around teenagers, con- cern about who might harm the innocent chil- dren is coupled with a fear of those children’s devilish activities. To complicate matters, many contemporary teens are heavily regulated and restricted while facing excessive pressures to succeed. The confl icting messages adults convey can be emotionally damaging.

What is seen as teens’ problematic behavior can also be traced back …