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Equal Employment Opportunity: The availability of employment and advancement to all people on the basis of merit, capability, and potential. A concept which addresses Equal Opportunity for all persons in employment which includes recruitment, application processing, hiring, job placement, compensation, promotion, transfer, termination, and shift assignment.
Affirmative Action: an active effort to improve the employment or educational opportunities of members of minority groups and women; also: a similar effort to promote the rights or progress of other disadvantaged persons
The concepts “equal employment opportunity” and “affirmative action” are often confused and/or misunderstood. It is important, especially when engaged in recruitment activities, to understand what the two concepts mean and the differences in their meanings as it relates to the recruitment and selection process. Equal opportunity laws ban discrimination. Affirmative action goes farther by requiring employers to take “affirmative” steps to achieve a balanced representation of workers.
Equal employment opportunity means providing the same opportunities with regards to employment decisions to all individuals without discriminating based upon their membership in or identification with a protected class group. A protected class is a group of people who share common characteristics and are protected from employment discrimination by federal and state laws or an institution’s policy. There are ten protected classes or groups at East Carolina University: race, sex, creed, religion, national origin, age, color, disability, sexual orientation and veterans’ status. For a list of definitions of each protected class click here.
Affirmative action means actively seeking to recruit underrepresented groups to the workplace. It is a policy to encourage equal opportunity and to level the playing field for groups of people who have been and are discriminated against. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, affirmative action “is considered essential to assuring that jobs are genuinely and equally accessible to qualified persons, without discriminating based upon their sex, racial or ethnic characteristics.” There is a common misperception that affirmative action requires meeting quotas or that a female or minority candidate should be hired regardless of qualifications. This is wrong. Although there are often goals associated with affirmative action, there are no quotas that must be met to be in compliance with the law. Affirmative action does not seek to hire individuals because of minority status or membership in an underrepresented population who are not qualified for the position. Affirmative action means casting a wider net by developing a recruitment plan that will reach a diverse pool of qualified individuals for the position and applying all screening standards fairly and equitably. This usually means setting goals and timetables and using a variety of aggressive recruitment and outreach methods, to include discipline specific journals and periodicals, web based advertising, networking at conferences, word of mouth, local/state media, etc.
Affirmative action seeks to recruit a diverse pool of applicants to select from and equal employment opportunity requires applying the same standards to all applicants during the application review and interview process. In this manner, the practice of affirmative action and equal employment opportunity work together to form the basis of affirmative action planning.
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