Sponsors should make good faith efforts to seek alternative or additional sources that are more effective at referring diverse qualified applicants. The Office of Apprenticeship has provided information and online resources to sponsors regarding recruitment sources. During compliance reviews, sponsors would only be expected to describe their good faith efforts to recruit diverse apprentices.
If the sources that a sponsor is using to meet its outreach and recruitment obligations are not generating referrals from the various demographic groups in the sponsor’s recruitment area, what should the sponsor do?
Equal Employment Opportunity
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Sponsors are allowed to select apprentices through any selection method, as long as it does not discriminate on any of the protected bases and complies with the requirements for selection devices under the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Additionally, selection methods must be uniformly and consistently applied to all applicants and apprentices and be facially neutral with respect to the protected bases. Read Selecting Apprentices for Registered Apprenticeship Programs for more details on this topic.
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No. Sponsors are not permitted to engage in preferential hiring based on race, sex, or any other protected category. Further, nothing in the Equal Employment Opportunity regulations requires sponsors to select unqualified applicants or a less qualified person in preference to a more qualified one. Indeed, doing so on the basis of a protected characteristic like race or sex would be unlawful under the regulations.
Sponsors are required to engage in outreach and recruitment activities designed to reach all demographic groups within the relevant recruitment area and need to ensure that their programs offer equal employment opportunities to all apprentices and applicants. Further, sponsors required to maintain Affirmative Action Plans may need to set race, sex, ethnicity, or disability utilization goals – if they find that their programs underutilize any of these particular groups. However, these goals are not quotas; they do not provide a sponsor with justification to extend a preference to any individual on the basis of a protected characteristic, nor do they permit sponsors to create set-asides for specific underrepresented groups. For example, the regulations make it clear that sponsors should not establish separate ranking lists based on protected characteristics.
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As a general rule, sponsors should engage in broad-based advertising efforts to ensure that their recruitment efforts extend to all persons available for apprenticeship. Sponsors must provide recruitment sources advance notice, preferably 30 days, of apprenticeship openings and must include their equal opportunity pledge in their opportunity announcements.
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The universal outreach and recruitment provision requires sponsors to send advance notice of all program openings to the recruitment sources on its outreach and recruitment list. A sponsor that has continuous open enrollment should send its position postings to its recruitment sources regularly, as well as whenever there is any change to the apprentice position posting or description. Generally speaking, a sponsor will satisfy this requirement by sending out the posting on a quarterly basis (and any time the posting changes). When evaluating a sponsor’s compliance with this requirement, the Office of Apprenticeship will take into account circumstances in which quarterly postings may not be cost-effective (e.g., for a very small program where there are hardly any openings) or might not be sufficient (e.g., for a program that has a very large number of openings every month).
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