Talent Acquisition & Onboarding

The intersection of changing workforce demographics, the demands of new jobs, advances in technology, and overlapping government enforcement regulators present new and complex issues. It is crucial for all employers to establish effective human resources management strategies in order to avoid costly litigation, lengthy government investigations and other outside party intervention with their business operations.

HOW WE HELP

Clients look to Seyfarth for innovative compliance solutions and best hiring processes. We use our industry knowledge and legal acumen to provide our clients with practical advice and proactive strategies designed to both ensure compliance and manage litigation risk. Our attorneys have broad experience evaluating all aspects of the employment relationship, ranging from traditional models to the cutting edge of sourcing, selection, and starting new workers. We regularly design and present training programs tailored to individual client needs and have developed personnel audits to assist employers in complying with various employment laws and minimize their exposure to class action litigation.

We understand that litigation avoidance requires smart and effective recruitment. It continues with screening, testing and choosing the right candidates, consistent with myriad legal obligations. Having litigated employment matters for decades, our team has seen up close the ramifications of poor hiring methods and choices, including turnover expenses, wasted training time, poor attendance, underperformance, severance costs, and, all too often, costly litigation exposure. To avoid these consequences, we oftentimes reverse engineer potential class action claims, thereby helping clients institute best hiring practices that are effective, lawful, and meet the client’s business objectives.

OUR SERVICES

Every day, employers turn to Seyfarth for tomorrow’s best practices. Among the issues we help clients address daily are:

• Streamlining and automating the application process, including implementing online applications and assessments, applicant flow tracking systems, and internal and external job postings.
• Ensuring that job descriptions are written in a way that effectively establishes critical qualifications while also complying with equal opportunity laws.
• Addressing recruitment challenges and opportunities, such as using social media and internet job boards to promote job opportunities, and communicating realistic job previews, internet databases and social media.
• Evaluating testing in all its forms, including advising employers how to select appropriate and defensible tests, how to conduct job analyses and validation studies, how to generate and read adverse impact reports, and consideration of non-testing alternatives.
• Providing effective guidelines to conduct applicant screening in a manner that comports with the Fair Credit Reporting Act and state and local ban the box laws.
• Assessing and training on interview techniques and tools, ranging from the traditional approaches of discussions around structured or behavioral questions, to video conferences, and other electronic tools.
• Designing efficient and effective onboarding and new-hire placement systems.
• Satisfying the unique requirements applicable to businesses operating in California and New York, as well as throughout the country.
• Advising on the proper classification of workers, including when to classify workers as employees or independent contractors, or when to classify as exempt or non-exempt under Federal and state wage statutes.
• Counseling on the use of temporary workers, both from the perspective of the staffing agency and the businesses that engage them.

THE SEYFARTH EXPERIENCE

Hiring advice often requires statistical analysis and collaboration with statisticians and labor economists to help ensure an employer’s selection methods are valid and otherwise defensible. Seyfarth’s People Analytics team assists by supporting employers with the data analyses, reporting and metrics to build innovative compliance solutions and best hiring practices as they strive to become the “employer of choice” in their industries.