Legally Speaking: An Employment Attorney Answers Your Legal Question

An employment attorney fields open questions from recruiters and talent acquisition professionals, working through the legal gray areas that come up constantly in hiring but rarely get a clear answer. The format is straight Q&A: real scenarios, real statutes, and where the law is still unsettled.

• Which interview questions are off-limits, including age, pregnancy, disability status, medication use, and prior workers' compensation claims, and why comments like guessing someone's age are a flat no.
• Salary history bans and pay transparency laws, including why open-ended ranges (like "zero to two million") don't satisfy disclosure requirements, and how rules differ between New York State and New York City.
• Whether location-based pay differences are defensible, and why they need to be grounded in real market differentials rather than assumptions that could create disparate impact.
• How hiring managers should give interview feedback without straying into comments that could implicate disability law, such as remarks about eye contact.
• What "not a culture fit" as interview feedback can signal from a compliance standpoint, and why vague rejection language creates discrimination risk down the line.
• How state-level rollbacks of DEI programs in public institutions might spread into private-sector hiring, and what that could mean for workplace culture.
• Where AI tools introduce bias into candidate sourcing and screening, including a real example of an AI-generated bio containing fabricated credentials, and why human review of AI output is non-negotiable.
• How to structure timed assessments and technical exercises, such as multi-hour skills tests, so they don't disadvantage candidates with disabilities like arthritis, ADHD, or anxiety, and when to proactively ask about accommodations.
• Immigration and sponsorship considerations for H-1B hiring heading into a new administration, including upcoming wage requirement changes and reasons some employers are filing petitions and extensions earlier than usual.

The through-line across every answer is documentation and consistency: tie every job requirement and every test to an essential function of the role, train hiring managers on what they can and cannot say, and treat AI as an assistant that still needs a human checking its work.