Nice Resume and Experience, But May I See Your Yearbook?

Our first grade class would get rambunctious during nap time, and Mrs. Alkire would threaten us by saying she would make a notation on our permanent record. Today we can laugh about our gullibility, but Sixties pre-teens didn't question teachers, especially since we needed them to tell us what to do when the Russians launched their missiles.

60 years later we've stopped laughing about the permanent record. Databases have recorded all our communications, photos, web searches, geographical movements, and financial and medical information for nearly 20 years. Worse, the data gatherers are vacuuming up as much information as they can from the pre-Internet days.

Headline: ‘I Was Young’ Isn’t an Excuse: Business Leaders Need to Revisit Yearbooks

Executives and business owners would be wise to know what potentially offensive photos, audio recordings and writing attributed to them in their younger days exist and could come to light, career coaches and crisis management professionals say...

As a best practice, companies should be doing background checks on all senior level and board hires, digging in 25 years or more. “You have to go back both virtually and physically,” he said, identifying “high school and college activities, fraternities, nicknames, everything.”

Eric Dezenhall, crisis consultant: “Nowadays, ‘I was in my youth’ is no longer an explanation...And racism is the cyanide pill of scandals. There’s no way to get out of it.”

In middle school we traded racial insults about Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Samoan, Filipino, Hawaiian, Mexican, Polish, black, and Jewish people, Other joke genres were religious (Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics), sexual, and intellectual (jocks and dumb blondes). Yes, it was cruel and crude, but if one is ever to go through a racist, sexist, or any other -ist phase, it's better to do so before one is an adult.

We Boomers prided ourselves on having overthrown the vestiges of Puritanism in 20th-century America. Frankly, the censorship and sanctimony on display today are much more pronounced, and the consequences--unemployment and social shunning--are more severe.

40-year-old job applicants in 2019 have to produce a high-school yearbook. Thank goodness I'm retired.