Posted on April 18th, 2019
Below is a complete transcript of the video.
How’s it going fellow entrepreneurs? It’s John Fagerholm from Metal Law Group coming to you from beautiful sunny California.
We’ve had a lot of rain recently but I don’t mind the rain because it washes out these dirty streets. But after it stops raining and the sun comes back out it makes me realize why I live here.
Weather just trumps everything. Even though the laws are terrible in California, there’s just nothing like waking up to the sunshine. That’s not really what I wanted to talk about though.
What I want to talk about is my theory that you should revisit your hiring policies once a year. The reason why I say that is because, number one, California changes its laws about every six months and some of those laws are part of the hiring department.
Number two, just the need to really have a system in place that sees who you’re hiring, because it’s so much easier to spend the time to hire a good attorney … I’m sorry, to hire a good employee than it is to spend all that time and trouble to get rid of a bad employee.
That being said, there are two laws that California passed recently.
One of them is the ban the box law. I think I’ve done a video about that already when it first came out, maybe a year plus ago. In general, that just says that you can’t ask a potential employee about their criminal history prior to offering them the position and then you’ve got to jump through a bunch of hoops if you find out that they do have a criminal background.
The second law, which is more recent, is a law that doesn’t allow employers to ask about salary history.
Now that seems absolutely stupid and ridiculous to me, and of course, I’ll do a video about that at some point in the future, but just think about that for a second. California has made a law that doesn’t allow you to contract with somebody or interferes with your contracting with someone.
It doesn’t allow you to say, “Okay, what was your value before?” Even if they ask for more, they can always ask for more. That’s what negotiations are, but California doesn’t allow that.
Wrapping up this very short video, hiring policies.
Number one, revisit them every year because the laws change, and number two, have a really solid set system in place because again, much easier to hire a very good employee no matter what system you put in place and no matter how difficult you make the system than it is to fire a terrible employee.
Thanks a lot.
Until next time.
