Handicaps in the Hiring

Constricted job interviews leave many questions unasked

How old are you? Are you healthy? Have you ever been arrested for any crime? Do your religious beliefs make it difficult for you to work on Fridays, weekends or holidays? Do you have or are you planning to have children?

Like private detectives, corporate hiring officers are paid to be nosy. But many interview questions, like all those listed above, are now effectively off limits in job interviews. Personnel officials must manage to avoid sometimes sensitive subjects like race, religion, marital status and arrest records, or risk discrimination charges and perhaps endless legal battles. Since the mid-1960s, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and federal courts have so confined companies in a mass of dos and don'ts that about the only totally safe question to ask a potential employee is "Would you like a cup of coffee?"

Employers can still legally ask anything they want, but they had better have a good reason for posing the question. If any subjects deemed unrelated to the job opening are broached and the rejected job applicant files a complaint, the burden of proving that there has been no age, sex, race other discrimination rests with the company. However valid and substantial the reasons for not hiring that individual may be, the EEOC considers the employer guilty until he is proved innocent. In a series of precedent-setting cases over the past 15 years, federal courts have severely limited the area open to a prying interrogator.

An interviewer, for example, can ask about physical handicaps if the job involves manual labor, but not otherwise. The level of English language proficiency and educational requirements can be set for a secretary but not for a truck driver. Age can be specified, but only if an employer is seeking, for example, a child fashion model.

Some corporations report that the EEOC'S edicts are not all that onerous and have actually improved hiring procedures by concentrating attention on the qualifications that count. Says James Cameron, vice president of personnel for Levi Strauss in San Francisco: "If the rules have had any effect, it has been to make us better interviewers. Those questions we used to ask were really extraneous." Robert Stenberg, equal employment planning manager for Ford in Dearborn, Mich., agrees that the guidelines have "sharpened our sensitivities and helped us focus on the criteria critical to the proper selection of people."

The interview guidelines, though, can be contradictory. "We cannot ask someone applying for a teller's job whether they have ever been arrested," bemoans a senior hiring executive of one Manhattan bank. "We can ask if they have ever been convicted of the crimes of breach of trust or theft because they are considered relevant to the job. But we cannot ask about rape or murder convictions because you cannot show a relationship between those and the job qualifications." Larry Vickery, director of employment relations for General Motors, joked that affirmative action guidelines are so complex that a company "might as well hire sight unseen on a quota basis."

Employing a new worker in blissful ignorance can sometimes be costly. Explains Herbert Cunningham, vice president for Administration of San Francisco's Transamerica Corp.: "One of our subsidiaries once hired a woman as a typist, only to discover later that she had progressive arthritis in her fingers. There was nothing to do but pay her medical bills." The new employee was soon collecting full disability pay.

Those who violate equal employment opportunity laws can expect to receive harsh punishment. Because Dante DiGaetano's suburban Philadelphia construction firm (total employees: one carpenter and one laborer) did not hire a woman to work on a federal contract project, the company has been ordered by the Department of Labor to follow 43 separate compliance and paperwork requirements. These include the appointment of an EEO officer and the submission of monthly "employment utilization" reports on federal form CC257.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.