Current Issues

In May, an HRworks Recruitment Governance Summit for federal contractors was held in Atlanta, Ga. HRworks periodically assembles industry-leading companies to discuss the OFCCP’s recordkeeping requirements and how organizations should implement their policies and procedures in order to be in compliance with the agency’s definition of an Internet Applicant.

This was HRworks’ fourth summit since the Internet Applicant ruling went into effect in February 2006. Some key OFCCP-related topics discussed during the May summit were:

• Focus on compensation
  As more audits address compensation, the OFCCP has begun to adjust its compensation analysis tools and criteria.

  Specifically, OFCCP compliance officers are reviewing data by job group to look for tipping point indicators of compensation disparity. This means that their analysis covers a wide range of jobs within a group, where pay decision factors can vary dramatically by job title, level and responsibility.

  For example, a director of sales and a director of customer service may be included in the same review despite the fact that their responsibilities and compensation are vastly different. As a result, the OFCCP auditors are sometimes led to false indicators in their tipping point analysis.

  Contractors are thus reminded to be cautious when responding to compensation analysis requests by job group, and to seek council prior to assembling and then submitting this data.

• Scrutiny of validation studies
  Another OFCCP focus is on companies’ use of tests to limit the applicant pool for a job; auditors will challenge any test uncovered during an audit. The OFCCP definition of a test includes but is not limited to evaluations, questionnaires, surveys, pre-screening questions, aptitude tests, and personality assessments. Some tests that may have been considered to be pre-validated or industry-validated by commonly accepted standards are being found to be non-compliant. This is because OFCCP auditors are scrutinizing validation studies based on criteria for a specific job, rather than a broad category of jobs.

• Third-party recruitment data
  The OFCCP is now requesting third-party recruitment data during the course of an onsite audit review. This is leading to an increase in the issuance of conciliation agreements that force contractors to appropriately track all of their third-party recruitment data.

Meet HRworks’ recruitment compliance representatives at the upcoming 26th Annual Industry Liaison Group National Conference, Tuesday, July 29 through Friday, August 1, 2008 at the Hyatt Regency Orange County in Anaheim, Calif. The theme for the 2008 conference is “Inclusion, Compliance, Convergence”.

Visit www.pacificilg.org for conference details. Click here to learn more about HRworks’ OFCCP Compliance Practice.