> There is absolutely zero reason why HR/recruiting people should have final say on a candidate.
I can think of one. If they are responsible for doing a criminal background check, and have found serious criminal activity in the prospective employee's past.
That's not to say that some prospective hires can't be rehabilitated; but in certain cases, hiring someone with a criminal background is just too much of a risk, and it's not unreasonable for HR to have a final say on this.
I used to work for a pre-employment background screening agencies. It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background. Unfortunately, it's not illegal (federally, with the EEOC, each state may have their own differences) to discriminate by personality test.
This is definitely something I saw prevalent in the hiring world: if it isn't outright illegal, use it to prevent someone from being hired. In many cases we had clients that'd tiptoe the line and ask if certain reasons would be valid for rejecting a person, and some HR managers were upset when they learned it was against the law to disallow someone who had admitted their criminal history from being hired. So they found another reason.
There is still a massive amount of hiring discrimination. It's just not the "official" reason anymore since that'd be illegal. That job was soulbreaking.
It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background.
I'm not sure if you are in the US, but that's not true here. As a specific example: if the crime involved money and the position is with a financial institution. We have a big problem in the US where felons can't get jobs which can obviously lead to a lot of recidivism.
> It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background.
Source? As far as I know, it's legal, but you have to show a good reason to do so, and finely tailored policies, that aren't simply a broad "we don't hire anyone with a criminal record."
There are plenty of cases in which you may, or even may be required by law, not hire someone based on particular crimes on their criminal background check, such as sex offenders for jobs involving children or felonies for people who need to get a security clearance.
I was overly broad with that, excuse me. It's much more complicated, but generally you can't exclude someone based on a criminal record alone as you rightly point out, and that's not accounting for other circumstances. So yes, financial will matter (of course, any financial crime means that license will be revoked and that record will be accessible as well), but unrelated crimes are different.
The main reason someone gets rejected from criminal reasons, in my experience, is having an old record that's been cleared or expunged, and then answering "No" when the employment application asks a specific wording of "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?" - The answer would be yes, and a criminal check would reflect something had happened, but that the record has been expunged due to enough time passing for that particular crime. It sounds convoluted, and it is. Not sure it really should, but I only worked in the industry. Whether or not the industry followed the letter of the law is much, much different.
Its ironic that in an America that lets legal shenanigans turn all kinds into criminals, that the same legal weaselling lets people get away with what is completely illegal, just because they say they didn't do it for the illegal reason, just some other reason they choose at the time.
Even in that case, HR can identify the risk paramters (likelihood of risk manifesting, expected cost if it manifests, overall expected cost taking all of that into account, etc.) but they can't weigh the cost against the expected benefits.
There are plenty of cases in which the company just needs to have a policy that it's an unacceptable risk. For instance, if the job involves getting a security clearance, a felony on your background check basically means that you are unfit for the job. Or if you are dealing with highly sensitive financial data, there can just be too much of a risk.
I'm not saying that all HR departments should have such a policy (in fact, in some cases it can be illegal to request criminal background information, at least on the initial application form). But there are some cases in which a policy like that could be necessary and final.
> There are plenty of cases in which the company just needs to have a policy that it's an unacceptable risk.
Sure, but HR generally shouldn't be setting that policy, and whoever is setting that policy is logically making the decision, HR is gathering an input to that decision (a potentially decisive input, but that's because of decision criteria set outside of HR.)
I can think of one. If they are responsible for doing a criminal background check, and have found serious criminal activity in the prospective employee's past.
That's not to say that some prospective hires can't be rehabilitated; but in certain cases, hiring someone with a criminal background is just too much of a risk, and it's not unreasonable for HR to have a final say on this.
Other than that, yeah, you're right.