You are an ambitious Gen Z, twenty-something with a You Tube channel, with 1M followers, a social
Question:
You are an ambitious Gen Z, “twenty-something” with a You Tube channel, with 1M followers, a social influencer, and a new Tik Tok sensation. Your skill is hearing sounds and quickly mimicking them, such as all the iPhone ring tones, mimicking the old dial-up tone, old telephone rotary dial tones, phone clicks, bird calls, dog barks, cat meows, squeaky doors, rusty gates, and all sorts of nature sounds. You are a “living sound effects machine.”
You hired a lawyer, a publicist, and other agents, acting on your behalf, signed their respective retainer documents, and began acting in your best interest. Two years later, after a successful production and social media campaign, you have managers in a large production division, making the “hearing sounds” into a phone app, requiring lots of “software development teams” and other teams necessary to “take the idea” to production, to marketing, to small sales, to large sales, to a full company, required now to abide by federal and state employment laws, to include policies and procedures for proper onboarding, training, promoting and out boarding/retiring.
Your Human Relations (HR) Department has recently informed you of “things going on” in one of the production departments. It seems one of the software development teams, all male, mostly Caucasian, some South Asian, have the lowest rate of diversity hiring, especially female, over
40, and especially persons with physical disabilities.
HR shows you a stack of excellent resumes, which were all rejected by the one software team, in question. In fact, the resumes had handwriting on them that disparaged the applicant’s experience, making jokes about their training, apparent “female sounding name” or another ethnic name other than South Asian or Caucasian name. They would not know about a person’s disability, except that some resumes had statements that the applicant would require a TTY device (Text telephone device), for those that are deaf, hard of hearing, or speech impaired.
Moreover, since no resume had a picture and most resumes do not list graduation dates, the team manager was still able to “do the math” and figure out an applicant’s age, by their work experience and those that began their software experience in early software languages. Again, those resumes were well marked up, with disparaging comments.
1. What are the legal issues?
2. What is the best course of action by company leadership?
3. What possible employment law violations has the Software Team Lead, committed, if any?
4. What would you recommend?
Management
ISBN: 9780730329534
6th Asia Pacific Edition
Authors: Schermerhorn, John, Davidson, Paul, Factor, Aharon, Woods, Peter, Simon, Alan, McBarron, Ellen