Business at Uh-Oh Enterprises is booming! Uh-Oh Enterprises is on the fast track to have record sales this year. The bad news, however, is that the demand is simply more than the current Uh-Oh team can handle on their own.
Uh-Oh’s CEO, Bill Wiseacre, needs to hire some new talent pronto if he wants keep up with all of the incoming orders.
The first step is to come up with a new and improved application to help him find the perfect employees.
He quickly added all of the questions that he thought would be important to finding the ideal candidate and posted the application on Indeed and Craigslist.
With his newly refreshed job application, Bill hired five new fantastic employees.
Things are going great! Uh-Oh is keeping up with demand and the business is growing faster than ever.
That is, until one day Bill gets a notice in the mail from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission… Bill opened it up to find that he had received a “Notice of a Charge of Discrimination.” What could that be about?
After chatting with his trusty attorney about his recent hiring decisions, Bill learned that he may have unknowingly engaged in discriminatory hiring practices. Bill didn’t know all of the ins and outs of how to properly ask the right questions on his job application.
Bill’s attorney’s jaw dropped when he heard about all of the questions Bill asked on the application. Questions like, “have you ever been arrested?” “are you pregnant?”, and he even asked for a photograph of the applicant.
Bill learned that even though he was not intending to discriminate against any particular group, the questions he asked were not permitted by the EEOC.
Now that Bill violated the EEOC policies, he would have to request a hearing before an Administrative Judge who will decide what his punishment could be for his job application errors.
The Momentum Law Group Perspective
To avoid having to pay for fees, damages, or any other expenses that come from a potential lawsuit, it is important to be very cautious about how you do your hiring. Your attorney can be a great resource for discussing the big decisions in your business like hiring, and how to do it properly. By taking the first step of talking to your attorney about the best way to reach your hiring goals, you can avoid the stressful financial repercussions that come with receiving an EEOC notice later down the road.
You can also check out this helpful guide about what you can and cannot ask applicants.
Blog Posts from Uh-Oh Enterprises are cautionary tales from Momentum Law Group. Bill Wiseacre and his family are fictional characters representing real life situations that keep entreperneuers like Bill from reaching full potential. #donotbelikeBill
