Big telco spies on job applicants

Way more interesting than your average “Company A spies on Company B to steal trade secrets” story of corporate espionage, Deutsche Telekom – a German telco – allegedly contracted a detective agency to spy on the intimate lives of its job candidates.

Docs filed under ‘Personnel Screening’ listed one of the women on the shortlist for a job at Telekom’s Croatian subsidiary as a “very experienced and imaginative sexual partner.” The report continued to reveal even deeper snooping: She is “known by her friends as a female predator with a seriously elevated sex-drive,” who “prefer[s] older men.”

Not sure how all that is relevant to whether she’s the right person for the job? We don’t have a clue either!

A couple other reports, which seem to have come from a German intel agency, called one candidate a big drinker and another a “corrupt rat.”

An unnamed source said that the company used 3rd parties to spy on the personal lives of dozens of prospective employees in Hungary, Macedonia, Slovenia and Croatia.

The company denied this claim, saying it does not solicit such reports as a matter of course. A Deutsche Telekom spokesperson was very clear about the fact that the company “does not have a policy of analyzing the private lives of its applicants. …[It] does not need any information about the private life of candidates.”

Very diplomatic assertion – though questionable, given that it’s coming from a company that admitted to going through the bank records of 100,000+ employees in 2006, as well as to spying on journalists and board members to find out exactly who was leaking juicy info to the media…

image courtesy of rd.com