Most businesses know that there are certain topics that simply are off limits during job interviews. Questions about race, sex, age, religion, disability, and marital and family status, for example, are EEO no-nos. Yet, some illegal questions are not all that obvious. “What year did you graduate high school?” might seem like innocuous small talk, but such a question could lead to an illegal inference about a candidate’s age.
Some illegal questions, though, are so obviously illegal that you have to question to sanity of the interviewer. Take, for example, the case of recent NFL draftee Dez Bryant. Mr. Bryant’s and his family’s checkered past notwithstanding, why in his right mind did Miami Dolphins GM Jeff Ireland think it was a good idea to ask Bryant during a pre-draft interview if his mother was a prostitute?
For more on subtle and not-so-subtle EEO interview traps, I recommend the following:
Presented by Kohrman Jackson & Krantz, with offices in Cleveland and Columbus. For more information, contact Jon Hyman, a partner in our Labor & Employment group, at (216) 736-7226 or jth@kjk.com.