Hiring

A lot of factors go into hiring the best possible candidate for a job, including experience, education and employment stability. Those are all legitimate reasons to prefer one candidate over another.

Q. Are there any questions we cannot or should not ask a reference when screening applicants?

If state Rep. Bill Galloway has his way, certain employers may be re­quired to use the federal government’s E-Verify web-based employment eligibility verification system. Several states already mandate E-Verify, and the U.S. Supreme Court in June ruled that an Arizona law requiring employers to use it is constitutional.

Good news for government agencies: People who apply for government work don’t have a property interest in a potential job, even if they make the list of finalists, and others on the list don’t want the job. That’s true even if the hiring committee states it plans to hire someone from the list and then does not.

Ohio-based Timken Co. will pay $120,000 to settle a gender and disability complaint from a woman who worked at the company’s ball bearing plant in Randleman.

Employees who don’t apply for a job or promotion generally can’t sue over the lost opportunity. But if promotions are never announced and there’s no process to apply, employees and applicants can sue. That’s why it is crucial to have some sort of application process in place that allows you to track applications and prove who applied—and by default, who did not.

Baltimore-based sports apparel company Under Armour doesn’t require its 3,363 employees to be athletes, but it does look for new hires with a love of sports and fitness. Reason: Team spirit is core to the company’s culture.

Whenever Las Vegas-based Global Sky fills a seat in one of its call centers, it plants a tree in Latin America or Africa, where deforestation is a crucial problem. So far, the organization has planted more than 2,000 trees.

When Tony Hsieh, CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos.com, interviews people, he asks candidates this question: On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being “bad things always happen to me”) how lucky are you in life?

Electronics and electrical engineering powerhouse Siemens USA will offer positions to 75 of its 170 interns this fall, placing 79% of them in engineering jobs. But the company doesn’t wait until its prospective employees take summer internships before it introduces them to the Siemens brand.