I just finished a week long course on staffing from Dalhousie University. Mr. Alex Filimon taught the class and he did a great job. The course focused on HR management issues including evaluating and forecasting current and future recruitment requirements, preparing recruitment proposals, preparing job descriptions and requirements, advertising, screening, testing, interviewing and making hiring decisions. In one week, I attended 40 hours of lectures, wrote 3 papers and took 1 quiz. Over the next 2 weeks I have to write a complete HR plan to recruit for a position of my choice, most likely an electrical engineer.
I learned a lot from this course, and I recommend that every MBA student should take a staffing class. I learned that the recruitment process is a scientific process. I learned that it is very easy to discriminate even when you don’t mean to (I did not like the way he laughs is discrimination!). I learned that you have to document the whole recruitment process and prove that every interview question has a purpose and is related to the job requirements. I learned that you could be sued based on the interview outcomes only. I learned that you could be sued if you fire an alcoholic because alcoholism is a sickness in most provinces.
What you need to do:
- Consult an HR professional before you start the interview process.
- Consult a lawyer if you have any bona fide job requirements (example: must be male, or must be age 21 to 25).
- Consult a lawyer before you fire an employee.
Quiz:
Do you think video resumes are a good idea?
After you answer, read the following article form Business Week on the potential consequences of watching video resumes:
Beware Of That Video Resume
Employers should think carefully before pressing “play” on the online video résumés job seekers are increasingly sending out, some labor attorneys warn.Cheryl Behymer, a partner at national labor and employment law firm Fisher & Phillips, says she advises her clients to proceed with caution to be sure they’re not making themselves more vulnerable to charges of discrimination. “You’re seeing a physical representation of the candidate, what their race is, their national origin, their age,” she says. “That potential applicant might say: The reason you didn’t [interview] me is because you can tell I’m a minority.’”
The idea of first looking just at a candidate’s qualifications, Behymer says, is to help prevent the filing of a failure-to-hire claim, which can arise if an employer is suspected of discriminating against an applicant who belongs to a “protected class” a minority individual or an older person, for instance. It helps at this early stage of the hiring process, she says, to keep information about race and age, for example, separate from a candidate’s skills and qualifications.
One process Behymer recommends: Have initial résumé screeners omit the video when they send along a candidate’s other materials to the manager actually doing the interviewing or hiring.
Like Behymer, Garry Mathiason, a senior partner at leading employment firm Littler Mendelson in San Francisco, says that employers should never require video résumés from candidates. That’s tantamount, he says, to asking questions about race or age “that at this stage in the process are unlawful.”
But, says Mathiason, “if the applicant decides to send in that information through a video résumé,” he doesn’t agree that an employer has to avoid it. Companies “do take on some additional, limited risk” by viewing an online video résumé, he says. But they can also gain from assessing certain traits in candidates—”how confident they are, for example.” Still, he says, to be safe, “I’d err on the side of including in my interviews all those who meet the job’s objective criteria.”
By Jena McGregor
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/c4038004.htm
