Who Is A “Job Applicant”?
For decades employers with federal contracts and resulting affirmative action obligations and reporting requirements have been required to monitor their hiring practices to prevent discrimination against minority applicants. To fulfill this obligation, covered employers are required to track the race, gender and ethnicity of each applicant. Thus, the question of “who is a job applicant” has caused much confusion among employers and counsel for decades. Compound this dilemma with the Internet explosion of the late 1990s, and you have a particularly vexing problem for employers to manage record-keeping responsibilities. By way of background, in July, 2000, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”), along with the Department of Labor, Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program (“OFCCP”), the Department of Justice and the Office of Personnel Management, began to consider whether the 1978 Uniform Guidelines On Employees Selection Procedures (“UGESP”), as well as their suppleme
