How to Determine if Your Employment Practices are Legal

To determine if your company has illegal or legal employment practices you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Am I selecting applicants based on "bona fide" occupational qualifications?

What this question is asking is, am I looking for job specific skills or am I looking for specific types of people? In order to reduce your chances of discriminating against any specific group of people, focus your applicant search only on "skills" and not on physical characteristics that are unrelated to the job. I make this distinction because some jobs require physical strength and agility that an employer needs to look for when hiring; however, physical requirements cannot include such things as gender preferences or ethnicity requirements.

2. Do my employment practices violate a local, state, or federal law?

This may be difficult for some employers to ascertain without a little work. In general, make sure that you do not give preference for physical characteristics that are not related to the job in question and that you have a company policy that makes "reasonable accommodations" for ALL employees. By reasonable accommodations I mean flexibility to work around family and religious responsibilities, modifications to work space to allow easy access for employees, etc…

3. Can any of my employment practices negatively impact a person in a protected category?

Here you will want to specifically look for outdated company policies that still have gender biased wording and connotations. Especially in regards to segregating jobs by sex, race, age, etc.