From Anonymity to Transparence: Screening the Workforce in the Information Age

We are called to contemplate the prospect of the law’s response to change in the American workplace in the next century. Radical change, cataclysmic events, are rarely predictable, at least not by professors of law. What we can attempt to discern are deeply rooted trends. I wish to do so with respect to the selection of the workforce; in particular, regarding the use of references from prior employers and of psychological tests. The former is a time-honored, almost hoary device; the latter has taken on salience only since the Second World War. The former, subject of regulatory legislation around the turn of the century, has recently been the subject of deregulatory legislation; the latter is essentially unregulated. Both may have further call on the law in future.