The hiring landscape is evolving, forcing companies to adapt to new opportunities and complexities. In the pursuit of not just adapting, but thriving, leading companies are embracing compliance. They’ve embraced compliance, in the broadest and most empowering sense, to develop and instill intentional habits consistently. For them, hiring compliance is no longer a box to check or something to fear failing. It is a cornerstone of building a strong employer brand and attracting top talent. Beyond avoiding legal pitfalls, robust hiring compliance fosters a diverse, inclusive workplace, enhances your employer brand, and powers a more efficient hiring process.
Embrace regulations as best practices
Legal compliance can feel like a winding road. From long-standing Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) requirements to recent pay transparency laws, changing-by-the-day AI guidelines, and beyond. Hiring teams must navigate an increasingly complex landscape of legal stipulations to avoid what can be costly penalties. As we share in “How (And Why) to Nail Job Description Compliance in 2024″ embracing and instrumenting for national and local regulations will instill best practices and level the playing field for all talent.
- Pay Transparency (for additional information we encourage you to read this blog post): Regulations, often found at a state level, stipulate pay range disclosure to advance pay equity and ensure that a role’s compensation is entirely dependent on the job itself, not the eventual hire’s previous salary or negotiating skills.
- Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): ADA establishes protections for Americans with disabilities including restricting questions and ensuring reasonable accommodation.
- Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA): ADEA forbids age discrimination against people aged 40 or older.
- Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA): FLSA establishes minimum wage, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and youth employment standards.
- Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP): OFCCP prohibits discrimination for government roles ensuring fair hiring practices for contractors.
- Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC): Enforces EEO laws, such as the aforementioned ADA and ADEA, which prohibit workplace discrimination, ensuring candidates and employees are treated fairly with equal hiring and talent practices.
- California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA): CPRA stipulates broad consumer protections for their data and how it is used.
Avoid unconscious bias that adds blinders
Unconscious bias can creep into the hiring process at any step, from job postings to interview questions. This can lead to the exclusion of qualified candidates, smaller, less qualified candidate pools, and elongated time to fill. To instrument your team to avoid these biases “out of the box” you can use an augmented writing platform like our Smart Editor.
- Sexism: Gender-coded language that could exclude candidates based on gender identities. An example is when sharing “he/she will join a 4-man team.”
- Racism and Tokenism: Racially insensitive content and language that discriminates against or tokenizes groups. While perhaps well-intentioned, a phrase like “we especially encourage people of color to apply” is unfair to job seekers of all ethnicities.
- Ableism: Content or language that could exclude people with physical disabilities, neurodivergence, or mental illness. An example is a requirement stipulating a candidate “Must be able to lift 20 lbs” even if it may not be a true job requirement.
- Ageism: Ageist content or language that could exclude people based on age, both young and old. An example of this is a requirement of “Young professional with lots of energy.”
- Elitism: Content that excludes people from less privileged socioeconomic backgrounds. An example is a requirement or preferred qualification that states “Strong preference for Ivy League graduates.”
- Religion: Content that excludes people from specific religious backgrounds. An example of this is a statement such as “You share our Christian values.”
- Nationalism: Content or language that implies a preference for talent of a particular nationality, such as “Native English speaker.”
Welcome physical or invisible disabilities or differences
All individuals possess unique skills and perspectives that can significantly benefit your company. However, traditional job postings, less than half of which companies think are actually effective, and hiring processes can unintentionally create barriers, as we’ve outlined below. Welcoming all talent doesn’t have to be difficult; it just takes intentionality. We explored this further in “How Datapeople Helps Craft Neurodivergent-Inclusive Job Posts.”
- Neurodiversity: Recruiting practices that unintentionally exclude candidates who process information and experiences differently, such as those with ADHD or dyslexia.
- Physical or invisible disabilities: Hiring practices or job requirements that unfairly prevent those with physical or invisible disabilities (e.g., asthma).
Display your employer value proposition
In the war for talent, your secret weapon is your employer brand. Fortunately, what makes for a consistent representation of your employer brand (standardization and measurement) are cornerstones of achieving hiring compliance. As we distill in “The Keys To Crafting a Winning Employer Brand,” deploying your employer brand isn’t hard, but it does require consistency.
- Language: We all write with our language nuances which can add candidate confusion and distractions from your core employer value proposition.
- Grammar and mechanics: Punctuation and core language mechanics matter for reading comprehension, yet are notoriously difficult to align across writers even with TA oversight.
- Benefits and other employer value proposition (EVP) standards: Benefits are one of those most heavily scrutinized areas of a job post, yet few writers get them right without significant TA oversight.
- Years of experience: Hiring managers may view the requirement of specific years of experience very differently than your corporate standards. This can lead to candidate confusion and inconsistency across hiring locations.
Instrument for systematic delivery
As you have likely already learned, your hiring compliance future can’t be left up to today’s hacks and manual processes. Training will not materially change behavior. Manual intervention and labor-intensive reporting may reduce infractions, but they do little to address the root cause. Are you curious how you stack up today? Check out our free AI-powered Hiring Compliance Checker.
Sustainable improvement can only be accomplished by embracing a way of working that reduces hiring manager and talent acquisition efforts while elevating individual and company talent outcomes. You can only win over hearts and minds and instill habitual deployment of best practices by making the future easier and better for everyone involved. To do so, we recommend you consider the following areas to invest in for systematic standardization.
- Job post writing: Empower all writers to collaborate in swiftly finalizing high-performance job posts in minutes with pre-approved templates and guidance that showcase your company’s compliance standards.
- Learning and development: Experience-based learning with seamless in-experience upskilling and expert-led certifications and courses to truly instill better behavior.
- Data-driven optimization: Democratize data to embrace real-time strategic data-driven decision-making for every post and in-market requisition hire – every time.
- Intuitive, ATS-centric workflows: Out-of-the-box integrations ensure a consistent and standardized hiring process is accessible where your team already works, securing data, increasing efficiency, and improving adoption.
Make hiring compliance your superpower
Hiring compliance shouldn’t be scary. If approached appropriately, it can be your catalyst to hiring Nirvana. Hiring compliance isn’t just about avoiding legal trouble. It’s about modernizing your hiring process. It is about achieving your full potential and maximizing the efficiency of your hiring process. And fostering a fair, diverse, and inclusive workplace. It is not only the right thing to do for talent communities and your business, but it will also help you stand out as a talent leader of the future.
To accelerate your progress, we humbly suggest you join the hundreds of talent leaders trusting Datapeople. Datapeople is a standardization and compliance platform built for high-performance talent acquisition. We help teams embrace hiring compliance as their superpower. Schedule a demo today to experience the future of compliance and standardization for hiring teams.