OFCCP Compliance & Fetcher
Updated
by
Support Team
The Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCCP) is a federal government organization that guarantees that companies working with the government with contracts greater than $10,000 comply with fair employment practices.
There are three regulations the OFCCP oversees: 1) Executive Order 11246 2) Section 503 of the Rehabilitation act of 1973 and 3) the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act. In general, the goal is to make sure companies are not discriminating based on certain attributes, and to go further and require active strategies to hire people from protected classes. The responsibility for compliance is on our customer’s team that has the direct government contract.
At the same time, our role at Fetcher is to demonstrate how our sourcing software works to keep you in compliance.
Executive Order 11246
Executive Order 11246 contains five parts, but only section 202, subpart B of Part II are applicable to Fetcher. Bullet one of section 202 states that government contractors will not discriminate in terms of employment, pay, treatment, etc, based on sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, or national origin. Bullet one also requires that your team take affirmative action to employ people from these protected classes by creating Affirmative Action Plans.
Fetcher’s sourcing platform has no effect on whether you do or do not discriminate against your employees. That said, we can assist with your Affirmative Action Plan (AAP), which is a requirement under this executive order. The legal precedence has shown that race is an acceptable factor for companies to include in their hiring decision. Therefore, it is acceptable for your team to filter by race or sex when sourcing candidates. Providing filters for women, African American, or Hispanic candidates helps you comply with your AAP.
It is important to note that our platform only allows you to take “affirmative” action to highlight these candidates, and not allow you to exclude candidates based on race, gender or sex. The current law asserts that while race is acceptable to consider during the hiring process, it cannot be given a numerical score or statistical advantage. As a result, Fetcher will not give preference to candidates or "score" them in any way based on their race, sex or gender.
Section 503 of the Rehabilitation act
Section 503 of the Rehabilitation does not pertain to Fetcher. This regulation is focused on employees or potential employees with physical or mental disabilities. Fetcher does not have a means to identify disabilities. The other two regulations deal with gender, race, sex, and veteran status, which are protected classes that Fetcher can help you source for through diversity filters.
Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act
The Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act has two requirements that may apply to Fetcher: 1) Your team is required to create hiring goals for veterans and 2) your team must collect and store data to track how well you perform relative to your goals.
The benchmark required can either be the same as the national percentage of veterans in the civilian labor force or you can source data from the Bureau Labor of Statistics to get a benchmark for your unique positions. Fetcher will not play an active part in creating the benchmarks, but our platform can help you identify veterans to help meet those hiring benchmarks.
The second requirement of the regulation that may pertain to your use of Fetcher, is storing your relevant data for a minimum of 3 years. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of your team to store this data, however our goal in strengthening our partnership is to help save data relevant to searches.
Summary
Fetcher’s platform assists our clients with OFCCP compliance by making it possible to identify and reach out to protected classes. It is not our responsibility, or within the scope of our platform, to help you create an AAP and no responsibility to ensure you are using our data in an OFCCP-compliant way.
This help document is not a substitution for legal guidance and ought not be treated in such a manner by your team.