HRMDirect COO Colin Kingsbury writes on the latest in recruiting and technology.

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Just when you thought recruiting was safe again, along comes a new (potential) compliance mandate that promises to make the OFCCP rules look like child's play. Whatever your feelings on the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act now working its way through the wheels of Congress, the impact on employers could be dramatic.

I started paying close attention to the debate from the sidelines when the issue of increased standards for employer verification of new hires first entered the picture over a year ago. While it's too soon to know the precise shape the final law might take, Elaine Rigoli's ERE article makes the stakes clear:

The pending immigration legislation would do many things, including the hiring of thousands of additional border patrol agents; instituting the new "Z" worker visa; and adopting new deportation provisions.

Perhaps the most interesting element for the staffing world is Title III, which would create a mandatory employment eligibility verification system to electronically verify the eligibility of every worker in the country.

Title III touches on document verification requirements; records that must be kept by employers; protections against discrimination; ID theft prevention and privacy protections; information sharing; and other miscellaneous policies.

So, in other words, you'll need to keep complete records, but not too detailed, for long enough, but not too long, and you can't share them with anyone except the people who need them, etc. There, is everybody clear now?

Unlike the OFCCP, this law would cover all employers regardless of size, and if you've ever had a new hire walk away because your background check turned up a "red flag" due to a false match on a name or address, you know how any type of verification process can turn into a Kafkaesque nightmare. On the bright side, at least every employer will be in the same boat!

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permalink  |   ( 3 / 502 ) Martin Snyder has never made any secret of his distaste for the OFCCP Internet Applicant rules, and in his most recent blog , he lays into a BusinessWeek article which basically says, "Don't hate the OFCCP, hate your lack of process discipline." Martin writes,

I agree, but I remain hopeful that at some point soon, enforcement action will commence and this matter will end up in federal court, where right thinking jurists will see it for what it really is; a constitutional affront, a violation of Executive Order 12866, and a costly mandate that neither meets its goals nor creates better processes.

How do you feel, really? Later in a comment, Martin adds,

This meme that the rule is somehow like SOX is bad spin.

Don't worry about me giving up beating on the rule- its my white whale!

Moby Dick happens to be my favorite book, one of the few I've read repeatedly over the years, and Martin, I hate to break this to you, but the whale wins.

CFOs aren't widely known for their acute sense of wit, but if there was such a thing as the annual CFO comedy awards, Martin's line that the OFCCP regs are not comparable to Sarbanes-Oxley because "SOX is designed to give quantitatively better accounting" would bring the house down. Many would, I suspect, say that SOX served mostly the same purpose as the tails on senators' tuxedo jackets. Martin is welcome and may well be right to say that the OFCCP rules are attacking forms of discrimination which are so imperceptibly small as to effectively not exist, but that's really a different argument altogether.

Chad Sowash of Direct Employers (one of the more important organizations out there today, IMHO), has in my mind a better response in his post, which mostly echoes the central point of the BusinessWeek article: consider the Internet Applicant rules as an opportunity to do a lot of things better.

In my experience, HR and recruiting departments, particularly in smaller companies, are often led by people with good intentions but who are gasping for organizational resources and attention. For many of them, the necessity of the OFCCP rules provide a convenient anvil not just to achieve compliance, but to optimize actual recruiting results.

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permalink  |   ( 2.9 / 512 ) Employee referral programs (and products to drive them) continue to have no end of ink spilled on them as we open 2006. Which is why I really enjoyed Anthony Meaney's contrarian take over at recruiting.com:

Why are referrals touted so highly? Are they really that effective? No they just make our lives easier. Look if I have a choice between hiring someone that is recommended by an employee or going through the whole rigamarole of advertising, reading tons or resumes, spending money on recruiters etc., of course I am going to choose the referral. It is a lot less work.

But is it more effective? Doubtful.

Read the whole thing.

If Anthony is right, the implications of this are significant for companies covered by the OFCCP's recently-adopted rule on handling of "Internet Applicants," which to judge by some commentary, threatens to be the Sarbanes-Oxley of the recruiting world.

Like the best-selling book Freakonomics, Anthony is flipping a rock over and asking us if things are as they seem. My belief is that referrals suffer from decreasing returns to scale, as employees move from referring the one or two truly awesome people they know, then to their cousin Jim who they see every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and finally to some guy they met in the bar after golf last weekend.

The new OFCCP rule complicates this by essentially requiring companies to start the process by giving everyone who sends you a resume fair consideration. At the very least you'll need to entertain those other applicants before hiring cousin Jim, and if Anthony's right, that might eliminate much of the benefit of the referral in the first place.

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