Ethical Issues of Data Mining in Human Resources

Data mining is most commonly defined as the process of retrieving additional information from an
existing data by finding a trend in the data. In other words, data mining is the set of activities used to
find new, hidden, or unexpected patterns in data (Marakas, 1999). Data mining in human resources in
particular has many benefits and those benefits have assisted many companies to improve their work
productivity, cut cost and achieve outstanding results in their respective area of expertise. However,
despite those benefits, there are some serious drawbacks triggered by data mining in general.
Nevertheless, this essay is focused only in a narrow aspect of ethical issues caused by data mining in
the human resources field.
One of the main ethical issues of data mining in human resources is privacy. Human resources
representatives have access to the most personal and sensitive information of each employee.
Personal information can be categorised into two: identifying and non-identifying information.
Identifying information are those which can be used to trace or find an individual including the
individuals name, social security number, e-mail address, and drivers license number. While, the
non-identifying personal information are the age, education, finances, criminal record, physical
attributes, and gender. [1] Keeping this information private is an ethical issue in human resources as
human resources representatives are compelled to maintain the confidentiality of an employee's
personal data. There have been serious cases whereby the human resources representatives sold
their employees salary information to financial services and debt collectors.
When data mining is being applied in human resources, vast information is being collected and
stored. Security practices are very important in human resources when in come to privacy of personal
data. Security measures should be taken to protect and keep the data secure because that
information could be harmful if it gets to wrong hands. For example, a former employee of a company
in New York stole 30,000 credit records from his employer in New York committed the crime over a
two-year period after he left the company. [2] If companies are going to gather and infer sensitive data
about individuals they must make a reasonable effort to protect it from unauthorised access and from
unethical use by employees or outside agents (Cary, 2003, p. 162).
Furthermore, when potential employees apply for new job, the human resources play an important
role of recruiting those employees. During a typical recruitment process, potential employees will have
to disclose a lot about them. Sometimes there are discriminations in the recruitment process based on
ethnicity, sexual orientation, race, religion and disability. For example, most recruitment process done
by many companies are gone through a screening of all those applicants and some of the applicants
will not even get through the first interview because of discrimination. On the other hand, when the
human resources representative hires an applicant because of his or her preferred ethnicity, sexual
orientation, race, religion and disability then that decision becomes unethical, because it will eliminate
other applicants that may be more qualified and have better merits.
Moreover, once employees perceive that a company is exhibiting inconsistencies in its commitment to
ethical practices, the level of trust between the company and its employees can be considerably
affected. A relationship of integrity and trust is a key determinate to any companys success and if
misused, data mining can be a threat to those two fundamental factors. Therefore it is crucial to
ensure that data mining is practised in a righteous way in human resources.

References
[1]U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), Data Mining: Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of
Uses,
GAO-04-548, May 2004.
[2]U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), Social Security Number: Federal and State laws restrict
use of SSNs, yet Gaps remains, GAO-05-1016T, September 2005.