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Robert Fulford over at the National Post has written an article called the private lives of exhibitionists in which he lays out his take on the privacy culture in which we live.  He leads off with:

He takes issue with the extent to which employers (and others) are required to go in safeguarding individual privacy.  He notes, and provides legal backup, to the notion that ?Requiring candidates to provide details about the years they attended school or the name of the school itself could reveal the candidate?s age, religious affiliation and place of origin.?  The Ontario Human Rights Commission issued a policy many years ago on hiring and proper questions in interviews and job applications.  These policies lack the force of law but are instructive.

Is an employer prohibited from asking for the years that a candidate attended school or the name of the school itself?  Probably not, however, where the employer asks for the information (directly or indirectly) and the candidate does not get the job or an interview, the employer may face a human rights complaint and will not be in a position to say "how could I have made my decision on a prohibited ground of discrimination, I didn't even know". 

In other words, once the question is asked and information supplied by the job applicant, the decision may become tainted and the employer will have to come up with a credible explanation for its actions and that the information did not form any part of its decision. 

The June 2008 IDEA Fitness Journal discusses a study in the Canadian Journal of Adminstrative Sciences (2007; 24 [1], 30-34) and recommends that interviewers "maintain uniformity in questioning, note-taking and use of a job description based on job analysis" and that these conform to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunals structures. 

While these uniform types of interviews are "safe" the criticism is that they are unduly rigid and don't allow a proper assessment of the candidate.

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