How you choose among candidates for promotion may spell the difference between losing and winning a lawsuit. Always document the decision-making process, especially when candidates are equally qualified. Later, you may have to explain the decision in court—and your reason had better be a good, business-related one.
Hiring
When hiring employees, negligent hiring practices can doom the process. Learn from your colleagues’ successes – and avoid their pitfalls.
Smart interview questions, well-written job descriptions, and sharp interviewing result in hiring employees that work out well, AND make you look good in the process.
People who want a job must actually apply for it before they can allege they weren’t hired for discriminatory reasons. It’s easy to prove someone didn’t apply. Simply post job openings and retain all applications.
The city of Greensboro is considering an offer to settle a racial discrimination lawsuit filed by longtime athletic director Jean Jackson. Jackson, who is black, claims the city regularly promotes white employees to management jobs without openly advertising the positions.
Q. We rarely post high-level management jobs internally. Must all jobs be posted internally so someone can’t file suit claiming “pre-selection” or that he never had a chance to apply?
Q. We want to hire someone who signed a noncompete agreement with his current employer. He asked us to indemnify him in the event his employer sues him. What are the legal risks associated with agreeing to indemnify him?
Q. Our company has received a number of résumés from college students interested in working as unpaid interns for us during the summer months. Would hiring such unpaid internships violate federal or state laws?
After the EEOC’s informal discussion letter about employers’ use of high school diplomas as a hiring prerequisite “caused significant commentary and conjecture,” the EEOC decided last month to issue additional guidance to help clarify the issue.
Be careful what tasks you assign to teens if you’re planning on hiring them this summer.
New EEOC guidance makes it clear: Employers better be able to prove they have a good business reason for running criminal background checks on job applicants. That means it's time for you to review your job applications and hiring policies—and start training hiring managers on what's certain to be a major EEOC enforcement effort.
Besides their obvious purpose of identifying work to be performed, well-written job descriptions are integral in recruiting and interviewing prospective employees, rating job performance, classifying employees as exempt or non-exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), meting out discipline, and making promotion and compensation decisions. Here are the 9 steps to crafting a legal and complete job description:
