Employers certainly should know what they can and can’t ask of their applicants in pre-screening situations, but amazingly, they often don’t have a clue.  This is one of those situations in life where what you don’t know can really hurt you.
 
Last week a Canadian university made national headlines for being foolish enough to actually ask its job candidates whether they'd been tested for HIV, the date they last menstruated and whether they'd been treated for cancer.  They were also asked to list the cause of death of close family members and whether they'd consulted a psychologist or made a claim to Province’s workplace health and safety board.  Worst of all, they’d been using this 40-question, four-page form for almost a decade before anyone raised the alarm.
 
The questionnaire was clearly discriminatory and violated Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  Under Canadian law employers are legally precluded from asking questions about people’s health or about anything such as civil status, religion, drug or alcohol use (or dependency) or their sexual orientation in pre-selection situations.  They’re not even allowed to request an applicant’s Social Insurance Number (the equivalent of an American Social Security Number).
 
Some fool who didn’t know a thing about Canadian employment law (or worse, simply didn’t care) had instituted a practice that had left the university wide open to a costly and unwinnable discrimination lawsuit had any of their applicants been smart enough to claim that they had been denied employment because of it.  Fortunately for the university, very few applicants know what their rights are in these situations either and so no one took them to task for their stupidity and illegal behaviour.
 
There are probably hundreds of organizations out there who use illegal hiring practices either blithely or intentionally.  They’re only one Human Rights complaint away from a lawsuit that could cost them hundreds of thousands in legal costs and penalties.  When and if that happens they won’t have a leg to stand on in court and they’ll deserve whatever happens to them.
 
There are lots of things that one can ask of job applicants but the onus is on the employer to prove that the questions are relevant to a candidate's ability to do the job in question.  That leaves room for a plethora of enquiry but why would one want to invest the time in cooking up a list of questions to ask for each job role one’s trying to fill?  Not only is it subjective it’s inefficient.
 
There are literally thousands of excellent, pre-existing assessments available to help employers assess people’s skills, aptitudes and attitudes.  They’re effective, reliable, accurate and best of all, they’re legal.  They will help you avoid the kinds of situations described above. 

If you’re hiring an accountant and give every applicant a test to assess their bookkeeping, math, reasoning, logic or Microsoft Excel or QuickBooks proficiency then you don’t need to worry about whether you’ve crossed a legal line in the sand.  Best of all, there are tests available for everything from management readiness, retail skills, banking skills, basic math and reading, warehouse and stock picking abilities, customer service, in-bound and out-bound call centres, sales proficiency, tenure, honesty, safety, risk avoidance, tolerance for high stress situations and more.
 
Employers who are cooking up questionnaires in the back room and then unleashing them on unsuspecting applicants are doing their organizations a disservice, behaving recklessly, opening the door to potentially huge legal consequences and worst of all, they’re wasting time and resources by reinventing the wheel (and doing a lousy job at that).
 
If you’re hiring people then you should be doing more than just asking for their references, reviewing their resumes and making decisions based on how well they performed in an interview.  Why stop there when you have the opportunity to dig deeper, compare apples to oranges and obtain unambiguous information that you can hang your hat on when making hiring decisions?
 
Creative Organizational Design offers over 2000 different assessment tools for 100s of different applications.  If you’re struggling to hire better candidates and avoid other people’s rejects, or legal complications, call us.  We’ll be happy to help you find the right tools for your needs.

 References: 

https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/laval-university-criticized-for-asking-job-candidates-about-hiv-menstruation-1.3777980

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Creative Organizational Design has 100s of assessment tools designed to help employers screen out other people's rejects, assess skills, aptitude, attitude and 'fit' within an organization. For more information about the options available and help selecting the best tools for your needs please contact us. David Towler is President of Creative Organizational Design, a firm offering nearly 40 years of expertise specializing in employee assessments and which has over 2000 different product titles available. Please send comments about this article to dtowler@creativeorgdesign.com. For more information, please contact us.