“Who ultimately receives employment opportunities is highly dependent on how and where the employer looks for candidates.” The above quote is found in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s compliance manual on race and color discrimination, which was released on April 19, 2006. While there has been a great deal of attention lately to the Office... [full article »]

Last year, I wrote an article examining some of the implications of the OFCCP’s proposed definition of an Internet applicant. Approximately one and a half years after issuing a proposed definition of electronic applicants, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) issued its final ruling on October 7, 2005. The definition will go into... [full article »]

Abercrombie and Fitch, a leading retail clothing chain, recently entered into a consent decree, or settlement, to resolve a set of three race discrimination charges challenging the company’s recruitment and hiring practices. Although there have been several large, well-publicized class action discrimination lawsuits in the last few years (e.g., Dukes v. Wal-Mart), what is unique... [full article »]

I’ve just finished reading a recently published book called The Cult of Personality, by Annie Murphy Paul, which presents a scathing criticism of the use of personality testing in a variety of settings, including the workplace. The book provides some interesting information, particularly regarding the lives of the authors of some of these tests.... [full article »]

There are a number of entertaining, and potentially valuable, stories regarding cross-cultural blunders that have been made over the years, particularly in the business world. One of the most interesting I heard recently concerned an advertisement for a washing machine that was being marketed in the Middle East. The advertisement consisted of three frames: the... [full article »]

It’s difficult not to see that the business world is increasingly global. I recently stayed at a hotel in Scottsdale, Arizona, where the employees had labels on their nametags indicating their country of origin. Although I interacted with just a few of the workers, one was from Mexico and another was from Iraq. All this... [full article »]

In late June of 2004, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California certified a large class-action case involving workplace discrimination. For those of you who are not familiar with this lawsuit, Wal-Mart, which is the largest private employer in the world (operating about 3,400 stores in the U.S. with more than one... [full article »]

In a previous article, I discussed the EEOC’s proposed definition of an Internet applicant. What you may not have known is that around the same time, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP (www.dol.gov/esa/ofccp/) as it is usually referred to, announced its own proposed definition of an Internet applicant. In this article, I’ll... [full article »]

As you may already know, in early March of 2004 the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), in conjunction with the Departments of Labor (DOL) and Justice and the Office of Personnel Management, announced a proposed set of recordkeeping provisions concerning who is a job applicant in the context of the Internet and related technologies.... [full article »]