How New Rules on Reporting and Documentation Will Reshape Your Work

Hiring compliance is shifting fast, and recruiting teams are having to make real-time calls on issues that didn't exist on this scale two years ago. A conversation among talent acquisition practitioners covers how organizations are handling vaccine status, remote I-9 verification, LGBTQ+ self-identification data, salary history bans, pay range transparency, and marijuana testing policy in hiring.

• Vaccine status in hiring: Some organizations strongly encourage vaccination for safety reasons without mandating it for employees or candidates, while others field mixed reactions from candidates who either refuse to disclose status or volunteer it and ask about a company's safety protocols.
• Remote I-9 verification: The pandemic-era allowance for virtual I-9 checks solved a long-standing obstacle to remote onboarding. Practitioners recommend auditing I-9 files annually regardless of format, and pushing for virtual verification to remain permanent rather than reverting once offices reopen.
• LGBTQ+ self-identification: Following the Bostock decision, agencies including the OFCCP are moving toward collecting LGBTQ+ status data. Recruiters are not shown this information when making hiring decisions, but organizations need to explain that clearly to candidates, who often assume self-ID data factors into selection. Separating self-identification questions visually from the actual application, and explaining why the data is collected, reduces candidate suspicion.
• Salary history and pay ranges: Asking about salary history perpetuates existing pay disparities and should be dropped from offer processes. Where salary range posting is required, ranges need to reflect what a company will actually pay rather than an artificially wide spread designed to avoid revealing budget, since overly broad ranges waste recruiter time and create internal equity problems.
• Marijuana testing policy: With several states restricting drug testing for marijuana, organizations are rethinking whether pre-employment screening for cannabis is relevant to job performance, developing adjudication processes for candidates with medical cards, and weighing safety-sensitive roles differently from others.

Across all of these areas, the common thread is transparency: telling candidates upfront what will be asked of them, why, and how it will or won't be used, rather than leaving them to guess.