A previous post on this blog talked about how several well-known companies are facing allegations from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, that they engaged in discriminatory recruiting practices. The issue was that these employers either placed, or allowed, Facebook ads that were selectively shown both to people under 40 and to men.
There are in fact a number of ways employers in the Denver area can run into legal trouble in how they conduct their recruiting and hiring process. Likewise, employers also need to be careful when promoting employees internally, as an employer is not allowed to discriminate in the advancement of employees any more than in hiring and firing decisions.
Generally speaking, employers cannot consider things like age, religion, disability, gender and the like when recruiting and hiring. This means that an employer cannot automatically eliminate candidates in a protected class.
As a rule, they also cannot have practices and policies in which these groups will be singled out. The specifics of these rules can get complicated and also have a very broad reach.
For instance, if an employer has pre-screening policies like a background check, a personality test or a knowledge test, the employer must either make sure the net effect is not to single out employees in protected groups or be able to justify the employer’s actions.
The best thing that Colorado employers can do not to run afoul of the law is to have a clear, non-discriminatory hiring and recruiting process that gets applied consistently. When employers do not do this, a candidate for a job may have legal options available to him or her.