Gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion and job boards have been a fear, a threat – but the reg­u­la­tions also seemed remote. Even when GDPR was imple­ment­ed, job boards were able to quick­ly com­ply.

But…

The real­i­ty is that job boards have been bump­ing up against gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions for a while now. For exam­ple:

• Europe is look­ing at Linked­In’s use of data for ads: The EU – which over­sees larg­er plat­forms’ com­pli­ance with a sub­set of risk man­age­ment, trans­paren­cy and algo­rithm account­abil­i­ty rules in its ecom­merce rule­book, the Dig­i­tal Ser­vices Act (DSA) – is ask­ing ques­tions about Linked­In’s use of user data for ad tar­get­ing. Specif­i­cal­ly – is LinkedIn breach­ing the DSA’s pro­hi­bi­tion on larg­er plat­forms’ use of sen­si­tive data for ad tar­get­ing? LinkedIn says they are com­ply­ing – but non-com­pli­ance is a big deal. Con­firmed vio­la­tions of the DSA can attract fines of up to 6% of glob­al annu­al turnover. The EU focus­es now on what they call large plat­forms – but that could include both large job boards and mar­ket­places that include job list­ings.
• NYC pass­es an anti-bias law: New York City’s Auto­mat­ed Employ­ment Deci­sion Tools law went into effect on Jan. 1, 2023, as planned, but enforce­ment remains delayed until April 15 after sig­nif­i­cant pub­lic com­ment. In antic­i­pa­tion of the law, Beam­ery con­duct­ed two audits to gauge the com­pli­ance of its recruit­ment tools being used by clients in the city. Beam­ery chose to test first for pos­si­ble gen­der and eth­nic­i­ty bias­es due to the lack of reli­able meth­ods of cap­tur­ing these types of data dur­ing the tal­ent acqui­si­tion process. One chal­lenge for the com­pa­ny was vague­ness in the law, specif­i­cal­ly with regard to how often the audits are required.
• The rise of pay trans­paren­cy: Bit by bit, U.S. states have begun requir­ing pay trans­paren­cy – allow­ing job appli­cants to know what a giv­en posi­tion actu­al­ly pays. Cal­i­for­nia, Col­orado, Con­necti­cut, Mary­land, and Neva­da require all employ­ers to pro­vide pay infor­ma­tion on request – and most employ­ers meet that require­ment by includ­ing pay infor­ma­tion in their job ads. In Europe, the EU adopt­ed a pay trans­paren­cy require­ment for all employ­ers with more than 100 employ­ees. How­ev­er, these require­ments are not wide­spread (yet) in most oth­er areas of the world.

So gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion and job boards have actu­al­ly quite a long his­to­ry. What’s com­ing next? I think it’s inevitable that laws gov­ern­ing pay trans­paren­cy will con­tin­ue to spread in the U.S. and else­where. It also seems like­ly that the use of gen­er­a­tive AI in job boards and ATSs will be exam­ined close­ly by leg­is­la­tors – and I would not be sur­prised if there were laws passed that gov­erned AI’s use in hir­ing. There con­tin­ues to be a focus on the intro­duc­tion of bias in both the screen­ing and inter­view­ing process­es. If your job board includes these ser­vices, beware!

What do they say – the only sure things in life are birth, death, tax­es – and gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tions.

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