Work Reform

Racism. They never have to ask if you're black but if you live in a predominantly black neighborhood they can decline to hire you without running afoul of anti-discrimination laws.

You'd be surprised how many things in America are just racism wearing a wig.

The charitable explanation is HR knows they'd need it eventually if you do join up, so might as well as for everything now since they definitely need to know your state of residence. Also some companies send swag and other stuff to prospective hires.

Your explanation is more likely.

I think they're just trying to verify that you're from a country they want to hire from and that you have a physical address. I just give them City Hall's address because it's in my same zip code and I doubt anyone's going to verify that I physically live there.

To send you tax information, mostly. This is a stupid thing to be mad about.

It could be innocuous, but the paranoid brain I have leads me to believe it's so they can attampt a background check based on where you live.

"maybe we don't want to hire someone from that neighborhood"

I put up a job posting for my construction company last year and I had applicants from all over the world. Probably 60% from my city, 20% from my province but nowhere near me, and 20% from other countries.

I wouldn't want or expect anyone to move for this job, let alone from the other side of the world. I manually rejected people who were too far away, but I can definitely understand wanting to filter out people based on their home address

The easiest and most likely reason is that HR is lazy so when they need to update info on their side on hired they don't want to reach out. They can just have everything in one shot. I doubt it's anything objectifying or anything to raise eyebrows over.

From now on, when they ask me, I'm just going to put a rich person's address. For this one I used a Brooklyn townhouse where Maggie Gyllenhaal and one of the Saarsgaards lives.

Pull an Elwood Blues and write in the street address for Wrigley Field

They need to know the state you live in for legal reasons. Some states create hiring problems since they can open the company up to liability by simply having a single employee in that state. Other reasons include ensuring they can actually get you on payroll in that state - as they’ll need to pay into state unemployment on your behalf.

The full address is likely just some default option that’s selected without much actual thought.

Answer: taxes, actually. If you become an employee, your actual address is needed to ensure taxes are taken appropriately. This is true especially in work from home situations.

When I was looking for jobs I realized that many employees asked this data to assess the distance from your home to the workplace and try to determine if you will be “happy “ on the long term or if you will quit for a job that was closer to your home. It was local jobs anyway.

~~To mail you documents related/associated with your employment? Not really unheard of to receive 401k/insurance/other benefits mail. Also, taxes and tax documents like W2's~~

Potentially background checks? Maybe? Otherwise yeah it's a bit weird and more information than they really need.

Overreach in data collection is everywhere these days sadly... far too many things are not properly considered PII (personally identifiable information) even though multiple things in aggregate could completely doxx a person.

Isn't your (and everyone else's) address public information anyways in your country?

Here you can search for whoever and find their full name, address, and a bunch for information. If you pay a small sum to a company (or call the tax agency yourself for free, but that's annoying) you can also find out how much money someone is earning.

Almost every phone number is also available and searchable online.

All this information is also available if you for example know the car plate number of someone's car.

So they can mail you things? I understand that most things can and are done digitally, it's still very common to mail things to prospective employees. Contracts hiring them, for instance.

Or, in your case, if they're a classy employer, a letter denying your application.

Just put their office address in. If they query, just say "Yes, I'm already living there so you may as well give me a job while I'm there".