June 25, 2012

No easy answers for delicate EEOC questions

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Ask any recruiter or hiring manager about what elements of a job seeker's profile they don't want to touch with a 10-foot pole and their likely answer is anything covered under the purview of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). In other words, the same subjects you should never bring up at a dinner party apply equally to a job application: Don't talk about sex, race, age, religion or ethnicity.

Nearly every legitimate employer today is smart enough to avoid exposing themselves to discrimination lawsuits by keeping all of these taboo subjects completely out of the interview process. If a photo is included in an applicant's resume, for instance, the application is almost always instantly rejected in order to give the employer plausible deniability about pre-knowledge of gender or ethnicity. Yet the issue is still relevant today because of the rise of online application forms, most of which include an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE) section asking applicants to voluntarily supply race and gender information.

These sections, usually located near the end of the application process, may seem patently in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits companies from requesting pre-employment racial information. However, as Mark Mehler, co-founder of staffing firm CareerXroads, mentioned in a recent Wall Street Journal article, the always-optional online EOE questions are designed to be used specifically for accounting purposes and are never shared with recruiters or hiring managers. In essence, the EOE sections are simply a way to make the job easier for the human resources department to keep track of the diversity of the pool of applicants and report it to the EEOC. The answers have nothing to do with the actual hiring process.

Besides, the basic racial and gender information requested in these EOE sections are easily obtainable in other ways. If a hiring manager really wanted to find out gender or racial information, many applicants readily supply this data to anyone logging into Facebook or other social media sites. In some cases, race will unavoidably be revealed if the applicant is called in for an in-person interview, and hiring managers usually can tell gender when they see the applicant's name. These are not exactly state secrets being protected.

Even with these protections in place, many job seekers still feel uncomfortable (and rightly so) about the very presence of these EOE questions because they present a potential Catch-22 situation: If they supply the information, there is a fear that their answers will somehow circumvent the firewall precautions and fall into the hands of hiring managers; and if they decline to answer, they worry that a refusal will send up a red flag that they are being somehow evasive or uncooperative.

While most HR departments and recruiters are tight-lipped about discussing hiring decisions, the vast majority seem to agree that today's online systems work as they are designed. An applicant's choice to accept or decline the purely optional EOE questions should never get to hiring managers, so it should have no effect either way on whether or not a person is considered. Of course, there is little definitive proof, other than anecdotal evidence, that this assertion is always true. Like all cases involving discrimination, it's often very difficult to determine which factors were ultimately used to make these closed-door decisions.

So, should you answer these race and gender questions on an application or choose to decline? There really is no right or wrong answer. Personally, I prefer not to take any chances with the alleged inviolability of the EOE firewall. I don't consider it my responsibility to ensure that a prospective employer is in EEOC compliance, so I usually take the safe route and choose not to answer.

What decision would you make?

Randy Woods writes about job-search tools, networking techniques and other tips to help you land your dream job.

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discrimination, diversity, gender, hiring practices, HR

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Deborah Witmer | July 5, 2012 11:51 AM | Reply

The Federal government is now considering adding disability to those items asked on those application questions. It seems to me this is different than those other characteristics, as disability is often "hidden" and would not always be easily discernable. How would you feel about disclosure now? And what of all those small businesses who don't have hiring managers and layers of privacy to keep this info from the one doing the hiring? Would those small businesses take their lead from their larger counterparts and start asking questions they shouldn't?

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