Legally Speaking: An Employment Attorney Answers Your Legal Questions

Recruiters and HR professionals bring their toughest compliance questions, and the answers move fast through the legal issues shaping hiring right now. On non-competes, the guidance is to keep asking candidates about existing agreements and evaluate the actual risk rather than assume they're unenforceable, since federal rulemaking on the subject is tied up in litigation and unlikely to take effect soon. Employers can still say no to remote candidates in certain states, since there's no such thing as state-of-residence discrimination, and a company can restrict its remote applicant pool to avoid pay-transparency or registration requirements in specific states. Other topics covered in detail:

• Why banning generative AI use in job applications is nearly impossible to enforce, and what to consider instead
• How to communicate with candidates when a company cannot offer visa sponsorship, without running afoul of immigration non-discrimination rules
• Why affirmative action programs and DEI outreach efforts should continue despite legal uncertainty following recent Supreme Court decisions, and what might actually change in reporting requirements
• Framing citizenship-related job requirements around security clearance rather than nationality
• Recording interviews for panelists who can't attend live, including consent, data retention, and preventing inappropriate questions from becoming part of a legal record
• Using anonymized, job-relevant writing samples to reduce bias, and why writing tests should never be assigned for roles that don't actually require writing
• Shutting down an inappropriate interview question in real time, including a firsthand example of a hiring manager asking about a candidate's basketball skills
• Addressing tokenism in hiring practices internally before it turns into a discrimination claim
• When requiring English proficiency is legally defensible and when it isn't
• Why questions about kids, caregiving, or family status have no place in interviews about remote work flexibility
• When a working interview or job preview crosses the line into unpaid labor
• How to give candidates useful, risk-conscious feedback after a rejection

Throughout, the emphasis stays on one test: every interview question, screening tool, and evaluation criterion has to tie directly to the actual requirements of the job, or it shouldn't be used at all.