Claire Gibbons's Profile

Can we trust companies to abide by their own codes of conduct in this case? What power would employees have to enforce these codes, aside from quitting? This leads me down the path of wondering whether HR and people analytics really belongs as an embedded part of an organization, or if the incentive conflict and power imbalance is just too strong.

I think storytelling in general is seen as such an asset if you are someone who moves between data and leadership teams that there is a strong incentive to craft a narrative and stick with it, even if the data starts to point another way. When it comes to people-related data, I totally agree with your point about the data scientists having experience, as humans, with a lot of these situations and thus making assumptions or jumping to conclusions in their stories. Perhaps one approach to try to help with this would be to frame things more explicitly as hypotheses rather than stories along the way. Hypotheses more naturally invoke the idea of needing to be proven or disproven, whereas stories show up as explainers.

Thanks for sharing, this is super interesting. My first reaction was wow, as a LinkedIn user, I’m definitely not thinking about (or even aware of!) these types of uses of my public profile data. While HiQ won this case, I wonder what types of “people v company” cases may follow (rather than “company v company.”) I imagine those will have broader scope and get to the issue you raise around the ambiguity of what it means to be “public” in a virtual world, and what a company like LinkedIn is allowed to do with the data on its own platform, let alone what an outside party can do.