Question

Adverse Treatment/Impact: As an external I/O consultant, you are hired to assess an organization’s selection system with respect to adverse impact. The HR manager said they recently offered jobs to a number of people to fill vacancies at several new locations. They have used the same hiring system for the past 10 years. She thought it was a good system but the data from their recent testing worries her. She provides you with the following data which includes whether the person belongs to the majority group or minority group and how many in each group were offered jobs:

	Applied	Offered a Job
Majority group	300	100
Minority group	75	15

In your analysis provide the following:

Is there evidence of adverse treatment or adverse impact? Why or why not?

What does your analysis mean and what steps would you recommend the organization take at this point?

Answer 1

As per the common “four –fifth” rule used to determine adverse impact, the test is done to see if the rate of selection of a less represented section is less than 80% of the rate of selection of the well represented section, then this suggest evidence of adverse impact.

In this example, we have the following rate of selection:

	Applied	Offered a Job	Rate of selection
Majority group	300	100	33.33%
Minority group	75	15	20%

Since 80% of 33.33% = 26.67% and the rate of selection of the minority group is less than 26.67%, this suggest evidence of adverse impact.

The analysis clearly suggest numerical evidence of adverse treatment and the organization should take the following steps to address this issue and promote diversity in workplace.

• Visit diverse number and colleges for recruitment
• Focus more on creating diversity and coach as well as teach line managers and recruiting managers on the same.
• Start a skill development programme aimed at schools or facilities in which lesser represented sections are in majority. Post the skill development training, the focus should be to hire or recruit from these places as this will address issues of diversity and also provide qualified and competent workforce.
• Re-engineer the hiring system to reflect current realities and ensure that no good talent is rejected because of biases in the selection processes.