Legally Speaking: Employment Attorneys Answer Your Legal Questions

A rapid-fire question-and-answer session covers the legal questions recruiters and HR teams actually run into, with plain answers instead of hedging. Topics include:

• Whether it's legal to guess a candidate's race or gender from an interview or LinkedIn photo when they don't self-disclose EEO data, and why guessing sexual orientation is a much riskier move once the EEOC begins collecting that information.
• What pay transparency laws actually break in practice, including salary compression between new hires and long-tenured employees, and why listing an absurdly wide salary range likely won't satisfy the spirit of the law.
• The compliance exposure created by hiring remote workers across state lines, including paid sick leave, tax registration, and why a non-California company hiring a California-based employee takes on more risk than the reverse.
• How to structure job requisitions for global remote roles staffed through an employer of record, and why following the most progressive jurisdiction's disclosure rules is safer than customizing every posting.
• Why an employee who has someone else stand in for their video interview can be fired without hesitation, and what kind of proof is actually needed.
• Whether an out-of-state non-compete follows an employee who relocates to a state that won't enforce it, illustrated with a real case that came down to which court received a filing first.
• How to legally run recruiting programs aimed at specific demographic groups, such as partnerships with historically Black colleges, without crossing into exclusionary job postings.
• Concerns about bias in AI-driven hiring tools, including how historical hiring data can bake in past discrimination, how algorithm design can miss entire populations, and why treating AI adoption as a vendor's compliance problem is a mistake.

Each answer stays grounded in how these issues actually surface for in-house recruiters and HR teams, with attention to where the law is unsettled and where enforcement is genuinely likely.