Employment Applications

jeanj

How long do you have to keep employment applications on file?

Renie

If they are hired we keep them with the employee's personnel file.
If the applicant is not hired, we keep them on file for 60 days.

cthr

If you have an AAP you need to keep the current year plus two prior years. If you don't have an AAP you should keep applications for at least a year. If you are sued for discriminatory hiring you will need the applications to show the skill set of the person you didn't hire. Hopefully this will help show that the person either wasn't qualified to begin with or that the person who was hired was better qualified.

Pork

we keep ours for 90 days and then dump them unless we choose to keep one longer for some good reason. Class A drivers, we never throw them away, unless we have interviewed and they are no longer interested in our position opportunies!

HR in Okla

My understanding is the same as cthr. We keep ours a year. If you have lots of applicants, it can be a headache. If you ONLY accept applications for open positions, it cuts down on the number of apps and your risk of being accused of discrimination. We have a few positions with high turnover, so we always accept apps for those.

We log them in on an applicant flow log, with date, name, position, the person's race and the disposition of the app. We file the apps by month received, subdivided by positions, in case we need to go through them again for open positions. Filing by month makes it easy to purge.

Don D

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 12-26-02 AT 02:38PM (CST)[/font][p]Purging or discarding applications prior to the expiration of one year is not wise or legal. The Age Discrimination in Employmwnt Act requires 1 year retention, as does the ADA and Title VII. As for selecting one or more of them to retain for a longer period of time "For some good reason", I would not want the burden of explaining that practice to the EEOC.

HR in Okla

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 12-27-02 AT 08:24AM (CST)[/font][p]Don, I think you misunderstood what I said. We file them by month, in other words, all of January's apps together etc, so that after January 31 of the following year, when all have been retained the full year, we can easily shred that month's apps at the same time.

When I said that we always accept apps for high turnover positions, truth is, there's hardly a day goes by without an opening. If I didn't have a pool of applications, we'd have even more lag time in filling them. Actually, I accept applications all the time for any position from walk-ins. We aren't that big an operation. I did not mean that we KEEP them longer than others.

My reference to only accepting applications for OPEN positions was really meant as a suggestion to the original question about how to deal with all this paper we have to keep.

Okay, if I'm all wet, let me know.

Don D

HR: I was actually commenting on Pork's practice of trashing apps after 90 days unless he saw a reason to 'keep one longer for some reason'. I feel that practice is both illegal and indefensible.

HR in Okla

Thanks! If I'd read back a bit, I might have figured that out! You are right, I reacted the same way when I read it. Pork, sorry friend, you gotta keep 'em.