If you hire younger people (and you will probably have to sooner or later), you have to deal with tattoos. A decade ago you could usually ignore them because very few good candidates or employees had one, but they are increasingly found on very bright and motivated young people who … Read More
Recruiting new members for a nonprofit board usually isn’t difficult, but it takes time and thought to recruit the members who can help the organization thrive. Recruitment should be an ongoing task for a board, complete with planning and reference checks, not a once-a-year scramble for warm bodies. (And it … Read More
As Abercrombie and Fitch is discovering, there are perils associated with making assumptions about a candidate’s religion, just as there are with assumptions about their physical capabilities. “Can you do this job?” applies to religion as well as disabilities. According to Quartz, In some ways, it seems that where Abercrombie … Read More
One of the most tempting steps to skip in hiring is checking references. You go to all the trouble of actually getting ahold of someone and all they say is “Yes, he worked here for those dates.” Still, it is important to do the leg work and, with luck, find … Read More
When you sit down to write up job descriptions, the first challenge is to figure out what the “essential functions” of the job are. These come in handy for hiring, especially if you have to choose between candidates with differing qualifications, and during discussions about reasonable accommodations with an employee … Read More
When people sit down to focus on a job description, they usually start with the tasks assigned to the position: bookkeeping, answering the phone, stocking shelves, designing products, leading classes, etc. This is the heart of a job, but it needs to be fleshed out for a complete description. A … Read More
The fun part about writing job descriptions – ok, the part that most people focus on – is the list of tasks that an employee is responsible for: answering phones, accounts payable, supervising, scheduling, etc. These are the obvious parts of a job, but there is more to it than … Read More
One of the lesser-known aspects of the ADA is that it makes it illegal to discriminate against someone because they “associate” with someone with a disability. According to the EEOC: The ADA prohibits discrimination based on relationship or association in order to protect individuals from actions based on unfounded assumptions … Read More
When “sex” was first included as a protected class in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it meant that women couldn’t be excluded from employment opportunities just because they weren’t men. Over the years, a more nuanced view of gender (the less distracting term borrowed from grammar) has come to … Read More
In many, even most ways, Montana employment law follows the federal laws, but there are a few areas in which it doesn’t. Here are the deviations that most commonly cause problems: Age discrimination covers all ages in Montana, not just people over 40 years old. This means that you cannot … Read More