Use Cash Money and Payola for a Successful Affirmative Action Plan…

We’re taking a shot at writing to one of the most sensitive topics available this week – Affirmative Action Plans, also known as AAPs in corporate America.  Why would we subject ourselves to this topic?  It’s the lead story of the Workforce Recruiting Newsletter, where Fay Hansen writes on "Companies Brace for OFCCP’s List of Compliance Evaluations".  Plus, we’re suckers for punishment…

Wow.  You can almost feel the energy on this topic.  Seriously, talking about Affirmative Action does one of two things – it either gets people emotionally fired up from talking about quotas, or…. it puts them to sleep.

In an effort to keep you fired up, here’s my big thought on the topic.  Don’t wring your hands about Affirmative Action and the potential for OFCCP audits.  Instead, go on the offensive, spend a little cash, and buy your way to a positive outcome related to your Affirmative Action Plan.  Stuff some cash in some pockets.

That’s right.  I’m telling you to embrace payola related to your Affirmative Action plan, and should you ever be audited, the OFCCP will love you for it.  (disclaimer – only ethical payola is discussed in this space… but it’s still juicing your recruiting efforts with a little cash…)

First, a quick note to those who have never dealt with an Affirmative Action plan.  If you’re in an Affirmative Action company (and you are or should be, if your company does 50K or more in revenue from government contracts), the OFCCP requires you to establish an Affirmative Action Plan (AAP) by doing the following things:

-Split up your workforce into 14 or so job groups..

-Establish the % of women and minorities in each job group within your workforce..

-Using Census and other data related to occupations across the USA, establish % "goals" for female and minority representation within each of the job groups..

-If the % goal from the external data exceeds your current workforce % for women and/or minorities, that job group is tagged as "underutilized".

-For each job group that’s underutilized, you need to get together a plan, commonly called "good faith efforts", about how you are going to conduct special recruiting and outreach efforts to close the gap.

OK, now that we’ve got the drudgery out of the way, back to the concept of payola.  If you have an AAP with underutilized job groups, you live in fear of the OFCCP audit.  When the audit comes, the OFCCP is going to focus on the underutilized job groups and really question whether you’ve done anything to change it.

So, here’s your game plan, complete with the straight cash money theme:

-Find sources that can help you conduct outreach and target women and/or minorities so you can close the gap in your underutilized job groups.  Examples could be targeted publications, niche job boards, and targeted organizations in your community.  These are the most common of Good Faith Efforts (and it should be noted, everyone tries to find these, establish relationships and document the efforts).

-Once the relationships are established, keep in contact with them, and in a classy way offer an external referral bonus that gets the attention of everyone in question.  Don’t have an external referral bonus program?  Great – start one.  Already have one?  Double it for these hard to reach groups.

-Once you have candidates in the flow from the special sources and you’re ready to hire one (because he/she is the most qualified candidate), offer a signing bonus that exceeds what you normally do in your organization. 

-When determining the starting salary for your candidate, get multiple sets of eyes on the offer to the diverse candidate, and document the incumbents you mapped him/her to when comparing experience, education, etc. to determine the offer.  Go above and beyond, and err on the side of the candidate.

Work your sources, offer the incentives, and sleep like a baby at night.

It’s important to correct the common misconception – that affirmative action plans establish quotas.  They don’t.  They’re called goals, and when the OFCCP audit comes, the primary 2 things being discussed are 1) whether you have taken actions to maximize your chances to address the underutilization, and 2) whether you have systemic discrimination.  If you have systemic discrimination, I can’t solve that with a blog post.

By going beyond finding normal AAP good faith efforts (simply establishing connections with diverse organizations or using niche job boards), you can maximize your chances for success and even if you don’t correct the underutilization, look pretty good in the audit.

Here’s what you’ll tell the potential auditor – we’ve established the connections with diverse organizations we think can assist us in addressing the underutilization, and to make sure incentives are in the system, we’ve 1) doubled the referral bonus we provide to "normal" external sources, 2) established a signing bonus for diverse candidates in the final stages of the offer process that’s above and beyond what we usually do, and 3) used a compensation review panel to ensure our offers to diverse candidates are at market rate when compared to similar candidates.

Remember!  I’m not here to debate whether these steps are right or wrong from the standpoint of society.  I’m here to maximize the chances you close the underutilization and look progressive in the audit.

Follow these steps, document them, and your audit will be sweet and peaceful compared to most…