This article addresses various ways that cybervetting recruiters (re)construct boundaries around the public–private division. Based on interviews with 37 recruiters in Sweden, we show how the practice of cybervetting is legitimised by the recruiters’ descriptions and accounts in relation to various notions of privacy and norms of information flow. We present this as a boundary work aided by especially two ways of framing information: the repertoire about accessible information and the repertoire of relevant information. These repertoires help define what information can be conceived of as public or private, and as legitimate versus unethical to search for and to use. Privacy is framed by employers as a responsibility, rather than a right, for social network site users. The findings also underline similarities and differences in jobseekers’ and employers’ norms of information flow, not least considering the right to online privacy.

Over the last decade, more and more Swedish employers have become obliged to check jobseekers’ criminal records beforemaking their hiring decisions. The use of criminal records for mandatory checks of job candidates and staff outside areasinvolving national security represents an entirely novel use of the criminal record database, marking a significant breach withprevious regulations regarding the database and creating a new potential for its utilization for surveillance purposes. Parallel tothis development, the number of enforced subject access requests in the country has increased dramatically. In this article, Iexamine this ongoing function creep of the Swedish criminal record database and its direction and limits, based on the moralpositions taken by the country’s government in connection with the new legislation enabling the creep. Newspaper articlescovering and commenting on two paedophile scandals that shook the country in the recent past are analysed to capture conflictingvalues around the idea of a closer vetting of childcare workers, so as to better understand the moral positions adopted. Theongoing function creep is studied in light of the ‘sociology of scandals’ to better understand what made it possible, and brokeninto its constituent elements to see what it meant in practice, what the forces were that drove it further, and how far it hasprogressed.

The practice of cybervetting-i.e., online background checks of a jobseeker's 'data double'-is considered to be a valuable tool in the recruitment process by an increasing amount of employers. As a consequence, jobseekers lose some control over what aspects of their past, personal interests or private life they will share with the employer. Moreover, jobseekers are expected to confess, explain and contextualize unfavorable information about them if they want to be perceived as employable. This study aims to show how cybervetting recruiters encourage and anticipate such confessions, and use the outcomes to evaluate jobseekers' honesty and capacity for self-reflection. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 36 Swedish human resource professionals, hiring managers and employers, and guided by Foucault's theoretical work on self-examinations, along with the confessional culture and its related concepts. We argue that confessions about information found on the internet are an important factor of what we label 'online employability': jobseekers' capability to sanitize, keep track of and explain their data doubles. Hence, as the recruiter can examine a jobseeker's private spheres, cybervetting is a surveillance practice with direct consequences on recruitment as well as clear effects on jobseekers' self-examinations and interactions with human resources personnel.

Institutionen för Sociologi och arbetsvetenskap, Göteborgs universitet Notions of Class and Gender in the Employment Service Job DescriptionsThis article examines whether job descriptions emphasize different characteristics and competences depending on the occupations' social class and gender relations . The study is partly a replication of a similar analysis conducted by Gesser in the 1970s . The purpose is to examine the prevalence of stereotypes in occupational descriptions provided by the Swedish state, and if the descriptions contribute to class and gender labeling of occupations and, by extension, its practitioners . Previous research has shown that career guiding materials are characterized by notions of the appropriate practitioner's class and gender . In this study we depart from the concept of doxa and argue that stereotypical images of occupations are based on common sense that remains unquestioned . The study draws on a quantitative content analysis of 420 job descriptions analyzed by various statistical methods . The overall results show that there are systematic differences . In general, social class seems to have greater impact than gender on what kind of competences that are emphasized in the descriptions . Social skills are emphasized in female dominated occupations, while physical abilities are highlighted in male-dominated occupations . To some extent, these results are uncontroversial, as it also portraits abilities necessary to do the work in different kind of occupations .