Category Archives: Hiring

Five Tips for Hiring Teenagers

Summer is coming, and you may be thinking about employing some teenagers. Here’s some lawyerly advice: proceed with caution. Employing teens requires you as an employer to foresee potential problems and correct them very early.

Here are five tips for hiring teens:

1. Safety: You have to be much more safety-conscious when you employ teens. In 2014, workers ages 15-19 had more than twice as many injuries that sent them to the emergency room than employees over age 25.

Your company has a legal duty, according to OSHA, to provide a safe working environment for all employees, which means you need to engage in extensive safety training with new teen employees. Cover the most common workplace hazards and injuries such as slips, trips and falls, chemical exposure, burns and cuts, eye injuries, machinery malfunctions, and strains and sprains, as well as any known hazards specific to your workplace.

Remember that teenagers are often uncomfortable acknowledging their ignorance or inexperience, so they may not ask questions that would indicate that they don’t clearly comprehend your training or instructions. They also may not learn without extensive repetition of the rules. Don’t assume that stating a safety rule one time is going to sufficiently train a teen worker.

2. Sexual Harassment: Many recent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforcement actions have shown that teenagers are very vulnerable when it comes to sexual harassment. They need as much if not more training than your more mature employees in how to recognize, prevent and report harassment, even if the job is not considered long term for that teen. Continue reading Five Tips for Hiring Teenagers

No Peeking! Social Media in Hiring







But if you insist on peeking:




Employers Must Use Revised I-9 Form Beginning September 18

The very important I-9 form, which verifies a new employee’s identity and eligibility to work in the United States, has been revised again. Employers must start using the revised form on September 18, 2017.

The revision, marked “07/17/17 N” and carrying an expiration date of 08/31/19, has to be completed only by new hires. You do not have to go back and get all of your current employees to recomplete an I-9 just because the form changed after their hire date.

Employers must complete an I-9 form on each new employee within 3 days of hiring. This process started in 1986 as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which prohibits employers from taking on a new employee without verifying the employee’s identification and eligibility to work legally in the United States.

The verification is done by reviewing the employee’s identification and employment eligibility documents, such as a passport, a permanent resident card, or a driver’s license and social security card, and completing the I-9 form. There is a very helpful employer’s guide available online that shows you what a valid document is supposed to look like. Doing your due diligence requires that you consult that guide each time you look at a new employee’s documents.

Because of the views of the current administration, employers can expect an increase in enforcement of immigration laws, including more frequent ICE audits of your I-9 compliance. There are expensive penalties if you as an employer cannot produce accurately completed I-9 forms for each of your current and former employees.

The minimum fine is $216 per error on an I-9 and the maximum is $2,156 per error (including current employees and former employees) for each paperwork violation. That means that a single I-9 form which has multiple errors could cause the employer to be responsible for multiple penalties per form. If ICE determines that the employer has failed to accurately complete I-9s on at least 50% of its employees, the maximum fine of $2,156 will be levied on the employer for each form.

You must keep an I-9 form on every active employee as long as the employee works for you. For a terminated employee, you must be able to produce an I-9 for three years after the hire date or one year after termination, whichever is later. To make it easier to remember, most employers wait to purge I-9 forms until three years after an employee’s termination.

Typically, when ICE appears for an I-9 audit, they will require that you produce I-9 forms for each current employee and any employee terminated in the last three years. You are given 72-hours’ notice to pull all of these forms together, which is why many employers store the I-9 forms together rather than in each employee’s individual file.

Six Steps to Preventing and Reacting to Employee Embezzlement









Preventing Racism and Incivility in Your Workplace

As a business owner or manager, you have the opportunity and the responsibility to combat racism and hatred in your workplace. Despite the bitterness of current political discourse and the appalling display of racism in Charlottesville, Virginia last weekend, or maybe because of it, everyone deserves to be able to go to work and feel accepted, valued and safe.

From a legal perspective, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the discrimination statutes of every state prohibit racism. Racist expressions in the workplace can lead to discrimination cases that are costly, both in terms of money and company goodwill. For example, a Dallas milling company settled with the EEOC in 2012 for $500,000 after 14 African-American employees alleged that their supervisors did nothing when the complainants faced racist graffiti and slurs by co-workers, including “KKK”, swastikas, Confederate flags, and “die, n—-r, die” as well as nooses displayed in the workplace.

This kind of discrimination can hijack the future of a company. Why would anybody with a conscience choose to work there ever again? Or do business with such a company once these actions were known? No amount of wise counsel from an employment lawyer like me can really defend, much less restore a company’s prosperity after these sorts of egregious actions are allowed to occur.

Employers trying to avoid discrimination lawsuits and to build a culture of decency can put into place anti-discrimination policies and training, can immediately investigate and take remedial action when racism is suspected or discovered, and can make advancement and better pay at the company dependent on an employee’s or manager’s embracing of equality.

But perhaps the most important way you can prevent discrimination at your company is by setting an example of what you expect from your employees. You are the yardstick by which your company is measured.

Christine Porath, a leading authority on decency in the workplace, says in her book that 25% of employees acknowledge that they acted uncivilly in the workplace because they saw their bosses acting that way.  As the boss, you need to have zero tolerance for incivility because it is like a gateway drug—incivility often becomes prejudice, harassment and discrimination. Getting away with one often leads to the others.

As a business owner or supervisor, you set the tone for your employees. Your words and actions determine if the workplace is respectful or hostile. You must tell your workers that bigotry is unacceptable and that you have a zero tolerance for stereotyping, name-calling, racial slurs, bullying and other abusive behaviors.

But more importantly, you personally must show your employees, not only by avoiding participating in these kinds of abuses, but also by making a special effort to “be the behavior you want to see” in your employees—respectful of all people, patient, empathetic, humble, transparent, honest and self-controlled.

Ending racism in the workplace is not just your legal responsibility—it is a moral one. Continue reading Preventing Racism and Incivility in Your Workplace

Key to Good Hiring: Good Interviews





  • How did you hear about this job?
  • Tell me about yourself.
  • How do you know so and so?
  • Do you know how to use a computer?



Hiring Older Applicants Protects Against Age Discrimination Claims

As older applicants know, getting a new job when you are over 50 years old is difficult and the reason often involves age discrimination. Employers like to recruit youthful employees, but they overlook the expertise and loyalty that older workers offer. Graying workers are fighting back in the form of age discrimination suits, so employers would be wise to reevaluate their aggressive pursuit of young workers.

Texas Roadhouse, the restaurant chain, recently agreed to a $12 million settlement in an age bias suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that Texas Roadhouse overlooked older applicants for server, bartender and host positions. The restaurant denied any wrongdoing, but after spending years in litigation and countless dollars on attorneys’ fees, Texas Roadhouse agreed to ensure that older applicants are considered consistently alongside younger ones. Silicon Valley is also facing allegations that no one over 40 is welcome to apply for a job (women of all ages face similar barriers in the tech industry).

In a more unique claim, PriceWaterhouseCoopers is the defendant in a class-action lawsuit targeting its college campus recruiting program. The 53- and 47-year-old named plaintiffs allege that their applications for entry-level positions were rejected because they did not fit PwC’s usual profile of a Millennial college grad starting a career in accounting. The plaintiff’s pleading scornfully mentions PwC’s brochures featuring lots of smiling 20-somethings. PwC admits that 80% of its employees were born in 1980 or later. Statistics like that make PwC a rich target for an age bias suit by an angry Baby Boomer or Gen X’er.

Smart employers are learning that the emphasis on hiring people under 40 can backfire. In 2016, more than 20,000 age discrimination claims were filed with the EEOC and another 2500 such claims were made to the Texas Workforce Commission that year.

Employers who fail to hire older workers risk more than just lawsuits. They miss out on the loyalty and tenure of older employees. While young people are prone to changing jobs frequently, older applicants tend to stay and be productive for many years. Society for Human Resource Management research shows that the employers they surveyed have discovered that older workers are more “mature/professional” and have a “stronger work ethic”. They found that contrary to stereotypes, older workers actually miss less work days and are excited to learn new things.

Mature workers often have broad networks and contacts. Their work and life experience mean they require little training or supervision. And many applicants born in the 1950s and 1960s have been using computers consistently since the Apple 1 was invented, so their technical skills are well-honed.

These realizations have caused some employers to adopt an “older workers first” preference in their hiring practices.

How can you as an employer avoid age bias mistakes with your recruiting and hiring and take advantage of the benefits of hiring older workers? Continue reading Hiring Older Applicants Protects Against Age Discrimination Claims

New Employees Should Complete New I-9 Form

If you are hiring any employees, this is just a quick reminder that you need to start using the new I-9 form to confirm your new worker’s eligibility to be employed in the United States.

The new I-9 form was released on November 14, 2016 (look for that date on the form to verify that you are using the most recent one). You already can be using the new form, but it is mandatory that you are using that new form by January 22, 2017. My suggestion for making it easy on yourself is to begin using the new form today, or at least no later than January 1, 2017, so that you start the new year off right.

You do not have to update any of your completed I-9s on current employees with the new form. It is only mandatory that you start using the new I-9 with employees who are hired beginning in January 2017.

As you know, employers must assure an I-9 is completed on each new employee hired (citizen or otherwise) to document identity and authorization to legally work in the United States. The new employee must bring the proper forms of identification and work authorization so that you can complete the I-9 by the third business day of employment, or you can no longer employ that worker.

Mistakes happen on an incredibly frequent basis while filling out I-9 forms and employers get penalized substantially if Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) audits an employer’s forms. Here is a guide to the most common mistakes and how to avoid them.

Another way to avoid mistakes on the I-9 form is Continue reading New Employees Should Complete New I-9 Form

Simple Hiring Checklist for Texas Employers



    • Race or color (photographs should not be requested)
    • Gender or marital status or sexual orientation
    • Union membership or affiliation
    • Details of an applicant’s worker’s compensation history.
    • Whether the applicant has any physical or mental impairments.
    • How frequently the applicant consumes alcoholic beverages.
  • Certain questions are permissible under the ADA:
    • Whether an applicant needs reasonable accommodation for the hiring process.
    • Whether an applicant can meet the employer’s attendance requirements.
