The EEOC provides the following tips to help employers avoid race and color discrimination:
- Job advertisements. Employers should not express a racial preference in job advertisements. Employers should indicate that they are “equal opportunity employers.”
- Employment agencies. Employment agencies may not honor employer requests to avoid referring applicants of a particular race. If they do so, both the employer and the employment agency may be held liable for discrimination.
- Word-of-mouth employee referrals. Unless the workforce is racially and ethnically diverse, exclusive reliance on word-of-mouth should be avoided because it is likely to create a barrier to equal employment opportunity for racial or ethnic groups that are not already represented in the employer’s workforce.
- Homogeneous recruitment sources. Employers should attempt to recruit from racially diverse sources to obtain a racially diverse applicant pool.
- Educational requirements. If the educational requirement exceeds what is needed to successfully perform the job and disproportionately excludes certain racial groups, it may violate Title VII.
- Arrest and conviction records. Using arrest or conviction records as an absolute bar to employment disproportionately excludes certain racial groups. Therefore, they should not be used unless there is a business need for them. Unlike a conviction, an arrest is not reliable evidence that an applicant has committed a crime. Thus, an exclusion based on an arrest record is justified only if it appears that the conduct is job-related and relatively recent and that the applicant or employee actually engaged in the conduct for which he or she was arrested.