Seeing double

There are two ways to catch crime: when somebody informs the police, or the police find it themselves. The former is most of the work of the police, and the latter is left to special units hunting specialised crime (and, of course, bobbies on the beat.)

When it comes to breaking employment law, we’re used to the former too. Whistleblowing and complaints come from the inside, like a spooky spy story. If nobody cares to mention that you discriminate against a certain group, then unless somebody reports it, nobody will ever know.

Or will they?

An experiment is soon to be run in New York, known as “matched-pair testing”. This involves sending two candidates identical in every way to employers, other than a single area such as gender or ethnicity, actively probing for discrimination.

The New York City Human Rights Commission will be looking to identify employers who discriminate against any characteristics currently protected under their Human Rights laws — this stretches from race and gender through to marital status and criminal history. Employers found wanting are liable to litigation, and are subject to discretionary fines and penalties from the Commission.

The Commission itself has recently been the subject of a concerted funding drive, with local government promising large increases in resources and staffing.

Similar experiments on a small scale have usually returned depressing results, but generally have been purely for academic purposes, and few have involved meeting in person.

This is the first time however that the results of testing could result in falling foul of the law, and is perhaps a sign of things to come. Employers themselves might even consider testing their own recruitment practices in a similar fashion, to nip any potential disasters in the bud.

Of course, nothing to hide, nothing to fear and all that. But now employers in New York will have to be extra alert to stay on the straight and narrow, because that candidate may well be trying to catch them with their pants down.

About the author

Jerome Langford

Jerome is a graduate in Philosophy from St Andrews, who alternately spends time writing about HR and staring wistfully out of windows, thinking about life’s bigger questions: Why are we here? How much lunch is too much lunch? What do you mean exactly by ‘final warning’?