The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) has guidelines for the hiring process which you need to follow. The most important rule is that your process has no adverse impact on any protected group. The EEOC defines the three primary protected groups as: 

• Women
• Minorities
• Those with an age of at least 40

According to EEOC guidelines, written tests used to select employees must not discriminate against any of these protected classes of applicants.

Two main criteria are applied to determine if a test violates the EEOC guidelines. The first is the "80% or 4/5ths rule". It examines the ratio of the "pass rates" of both the protected and the majority classes. The percentage of the protected class members who pass an assessment should be at least 4/5ths of the percentage of the majority class members who pass. For example, the percentage of women who are rated as having substantial growth potential should be at least 4/5ths of the corresponding percentage for men.

The second criterion is whether the difference in the "pass rates" for the protected and majority groups reaches statistical significance. In other words, could the difference between the two groups be a matter of random variation or does it represent a real difference? A level of statistical significance of .05 or lower means that the difference is unlikely to be the result of random variation.

An independent study of our sales profile demonstrated that both criteria are met. For all comparisons studied, the pass rate of the protected group comfortably exceeded 4/5ths of the majority group's percentage, and none of the comparisons approached a statistical significance level of .05. The study concluded that there is no adverse impact of our sales profile on any protected group.