Have Employers Peeked at Pay History for Job Applicants? Hard to Tell

For several years, local and state governments in places including California and New York have banned employers from asking job applicants how much they’ve earned in the past. The worry was that the practice could perpetuate pay inequities. But an information service employers use to vet job applicants—including at top tech companies like Apple and Google—has continued to make detailed employee pay histories available to clients if they want to look at it.

Big tech companies say they don’t peek at the pay data provided by the service—which is offered by Equifax, the giant data broker—using it instead to simply verify where job applicants have worked in the past. But there’s a wrinkle: Equifax doesn’t give enough information to workers for them to tell if their employers have accessed their pay data or not.

The Information asked several tech workers who were recently hired by or have worked with big tech companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and TikTok to share their files from the Equifax service. Their reports said only that employers and firms hired by tech companies to vet applicants accessed their records “for employment purposes,” without revealing what the companies looked at.