Corporate Compliance: Are You Asking Legal Interview Questions?

Corporate compliance is a field chock full of volumes of rules and regulations that govern fairness and legality in the workplace. Most of these regulations are covered in text that is in black and white and can be referenced easily. But there are also a lot of gray areas, and here is where the problems lie in wait.

One of these gray areas has to do with the process of interviewing potential new hires…what questions are legally defensible and which are not. And the consequences of asking a “wrong” question can leave your company liable for a lawsuit by a job candidate who feels they were unfairly discriminated against. This is not the kind of publicity or risk you want!

Just so you know how prevalent this problem is…a Harris poll released in 2015 of over 2,000 hiring managers revealed that one in five admitted to unknowingly asking an illegal question. That is too high a percentage for businesses to take such a risk.  Sadly, a recent client paid a candidate $85,000 for an uneducated hiring manager asking about their age and marital status.  And they got off lucky.  The average employee lawsuit costs $250,000 and the majority of cases are ruled in the plaintiff’s favor when taken to litigation.

What can you do to effectively educate your hiring managers on the kinds of questions they can legally ask to properly mitigate your risk? By providing proven, interactive corporate compliance training conducted by engaging facilitators who have actually worked as attorneys. The cost will be far less than the financial and reputation-scarring costs of a lawsuit.

Did you know that the following subjects are off limits legally in an interview session? Besides the obviously taboo questions about race or religion or political affiliation, you cannot ask questions about:
• Pregnancy
• Plans for having children
• Marital status
• Finances
• Whether or not a candidate uses tobacco products or alcohol

And to complicate things further, it can be the way you ask the question that tips it from a question that is “right” to a question that is “wrong.”  For instance, you can ask if a candidate is “legally eligible for employment in the U.S.” But you cannot ask more directly about where a candidate was born or their citizenship status.

Smart HR leaders protect their company by providing hiring staff with the corporate compliance training they need to stay out of court. You will sleep better at night knowing your interviewers have learned how to be legally smart about what and how they ask.

Learn more at: http://www.lsaglobal.com/corporate-compliance-training/