Applicant Or Promotion
It is our experience that most companies include internal candidates as applicants when they recruit internally and externally for a position. But if the person picked to fill the position comes from within, we generally suggest counting that as a promotion rather than a new hire. Problems compound by counting internal candidates picked for a position as new hires rather than promotions.
New hires are used in the Goals Progress report to show advancement toward more women/minorities in the workforce. If the internal person chosen was a minority and tracked as a new hire, when it was really a promotion or transfer within the same job group, then the company is incorrectly portraying that they added a minority to the particular job group and are progressing toward their goal. The reality is that they just promoted or transferred the minority from one position to another within the same job group, so they did not net any increase in minorities.
However, there does not appear to be any particular statute or regulation that would prevent a company from treating applicant and promotions differently. A company could certainly choose to tie every set of applicants to a particular hire, then put those hires for a given year together with the applicants regardless of when they applied and complete an Adverse Impact Analysis on that data. It might be a little more "Accurate" since every hire includes all the applicants, but most companies lump all the hires for the year together into job groups, so whether a particular hire was discriminatory is lost anyway. We are looking for trends and indications of systemic discrimination in the Adverse Impact Analysis, not individual instances of discrimination.
See Also
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