[privacylawthrow]

The law also requires that Colorado employees be informed of all promotional opportunities. A promotional opportunity is "a vacancy in an existing or new position that could be considered a promotion for one or more employees in terms of compensation, benefits, status, duties, or access to further advancement."

If a company doesn't already have Colorado employees, they may not be interested in having a remote employee in CO that requires special treatment.

[throwaway0a5e]

>If a company doesn't already have Colorado employees, they may not be interested in having a remote employee in CO that requires special treatment.

Generalize even further. If the company doesn't already have employees in <different regulatory jurisdiction> then they won't incur the cost of compliance in <different regulatory jurisdiction> all else being equal.

If CO had very cheap labor it would pencil out and they'd gladly jump through the hoops to comply. But CO doesn't have particularly cheap labor for the kinds of jobs in question.

Heck, my company wanted to hire a specific expert in a specific field. They were willing to pay the moon but but still almost didn't do it because of the compliance headache from having international employees. They hired a 3rd party intermediary to hire this person.

[grumple]

Any company over 1 billion in market cap probably already does this. Every company I've worked for has (mid sized to fortune 10). HR has to justify their existence by actually doing work.

It's also in the company's interest to provide advancement opportunities internally, otherwise your employees just leave. In this case the regulations are in line with the incentives.

[NCFZ]

True, but the most of the examples people found are of companies that already have Colorado employees.

[refurb]

Right, but this applies to job postings. Current employees don’t require any additional work as they’re already hired.

[paulgb]

Here's the act, it looks like it does have some additional requirements for companies with CO employees: https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb19-085

If remote work sticks around (I think it will), it will be interesting to see how employers handle the additional burden of having employees in dozens or even hundreds of jurisdictions. I don't think it's insurmountable, but it's certainly something many companies have not had to deal with before.

[rswail]

The same way they deal with the asinine US sales taxes or how international companies deal with hiring internationally.

They'll outsource it to companies that look after it for them. This is the "resources" bit of "human resources".

In the meantime, maybe the actual HR people could get back to being "people and culture" managers and stop thinking of staff as "resources".

[inter_netuser]

There are companies that automate a lot of this, specifically to support remote-first companies.

[waheoo]

...

[elliekelly]

Who says the CO remote employee requires special treatment? That would be a terrible leadership decision. The easy and obvious approach would be to treat all employees under the CO standard. It’s as simple as posting all open positions internally. Or even sending a firm-wide email when a new position is posted externally. I have a hard time believing most companies aren’t already doing this with the exception maybe of retail/labor-intensive positions where employees aren’t regularly using a computer. Certainly most companies hiring remote workers would be though.

[x0x0]

Context: startup, 50ish employees.

We don't necessarily want to advertise all open positions to an internal selection process, particularly more senior managers.

The record keeping requirements in CO are concerning, particularly job description records. In particular, we don't yet have a full time HR person (there is a dedicated person, but that person has other job duties).

There's 49 other states.

edit: one more reason. We had a failing exec. Not enough to merit immediate firing, but failing enough that it was clear he or she was not going to last through the next round. We needed that person to continue doing a mildly-failing job while we found a replacement, due to lack of another person who could take on those responsibilities.

Not sure how you manage something like that with an internal hiring announcement.

[logosmonkey]

Yeah, I don't quite get the rub here. The corporations I've worked for always post jobs internally first and normally they email the entire org with open positions. In general I've found most corporations want to hire internally since it's cheaper overall.

[MattGaiser]

I think it depends on the company.

In a past organization a friend was HR at, there were branch office jobs and corporate jobs. Officially you could get promoted to the corporate office. Unofficially, don't bother as they optimized for different things for each hiring pool.

So they tried to keep the corporate jobs only available to the corporate people as otherwise the branch people would get excited and then end up having their dreams dashed from repeatedly applying and having their resumes chucked while an external hire filled their job.

[ghaff]

Yeah, you especially don't want to proactively push out a bunch of job postings to people who have exactly zero chance of landing the position because the decision has already been made.

[MattGaiser]

That too.

Plenty of job postings exist merely for compliance. So all you are doing is wasting a lot of time.

[sct202]

The worst is when the hiring managers have to go thru with interviewing N people who applied to comply with policy.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Many organizations just aren’t structured that way. I had a coworker who worked alone on what was a small project, gradually transitioning to a technical leadership role over the project as it got larger, until eventually he became the manager of the team that owns it. So he got a promotion opportunity, but there was never an opening as such; it would be pretty unfair for the company to open up applications for anyone to come in and take his project away.

[ghaff]

I don't know how HR departments typically deal with this sort of thing. There's an obvious downside to posting a bunch of job openings that have effectively already been filled. The same applies to outside hires that effectively have had positions created for them (and job descriptions written with them in mind).

[sokoloff]

We have something like 15,000 employees and 20 some odd brand companies that operate largely independently. There is no reasonable way for us to wrangle every single opening into a single process to comply with a CO law (times all the other jurisdictions who’d like to put their own thumbprint on it).

I would always rather take a qualified internal candidate rather than spend months to land someone outside. So, I do shop jobs internally now, but Even without reading the CO law, I’m pretty sure I’m not fully complying with it if I had an employee in CO.

[alistairSH]

At that size, I imagine you're already operating across several states, and HR already has processes in place to deal with differing regulatory requirements. Adding the latest CO rules to these processes isn't all that onerous in the overall scheme of things. It's not like "post a minimum salary" and "post listings internally" are crazy or complicated ideas.

[brendoelfrendo]

I can't see why the number of employees or companies complicates this. I work for an enterprise with over 60,000 employees and they have decided to apply the Colorado standard to all job openings.

Editing This was poor word choice in the morning; I should say I can clearly see how the size or scope of a company could complicate this. I just don't have any sympathy for them; you adapt your processes to match the desired state.

[ghaff]

>Or even sending a firm-wide email when a new position is posted externally.

Please. No more emails.

>It’s as simple as posting all open positions internally.

One of the problems that happens (today) with this is that companies decide to hire someone external for a position essentially created for them. So they may create a job posting as a formality. But it's effectively a fake posting. No one else actually has a shot at an interview, much less getting the position.

[Mauricebranagh]

Ah the CEO's golfing buddy's son or daughter.

Don't try this in Northern Ireland btw. I know of US mangers getting into some serious hot water over not advertising the job in Catholic and Protestant publications.

[ghaff]

Or just someone senior people have worked with before in some capacity. I had a job description written for me in my current US role.

[earlhathaway]

Hey -- opened your profile because I was curious. If you're working on a company and interested in chatting, email in my profile.

[refurb]

Wow. I could see companies excluding CO just due to the regulatory burden alone, even if they agree with the spirit of the law.

I mean why create new HR processes when you have 49 other states to hire from?

[ClumsyPilot]

My curent company shares an email about open promotional opportunities every 6 months. I am continously amazon how on hackernews expecting basic decensy from corporates is a 'terrible burden'

[fennecfoxen]

Excuse me. You're not expecting, quote, "basic decency." You are expecting compliance with a specific regulatory framework. One of these requires a soul, the other requires lawyers and paperwork and record-keeping.

[SkyBelow]

By that view, does anyone expect "basic decency"?

For example, I could say that I expect "basic decency" to not kill each other. But I also support having a law making murder illegal. As part of that law, you have the possibility of people being jailed, possible for months are years, before we even get to a court case. They may be able to pay a large fee to get back to their daily life (while part of the money is sometimes returned, there are plenty exceptions to this). Then you get to the court case, where people are expected to spend days in courts and small fortunes on lawyers to prove they didn't murder someone. Lots and lots of lawyers and paperwork and record-keeping, not to mention the costs to an innocent individual wrongly accused. Good luck getting any payments to make up the debt you incurred.

Yet as a society we accept that we have to do things the legal way because just the expectation alone does nothing to stop bad people. As such the concept of "basic decency" is completely gone from the modern world, so I think it is safe to give it a new definition which includes the enforcement of a legal framework.

[ClumsyPilot]

The is nothing profitable a corporate bureaucracy won't do out of 'basic decency'

Before we had 'spesific regulatory framework' companies enslaved people, exploited children, commercialised rape and commited serial murder to break up unions

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

[fennecfoxen]

I am having trouble reconciling your assertions, in which you seem to think HN should expect "basic decency" from corporations while simultaneously asserting that "'basic decency'" has never actually served as a meaningful barrier. It seems to me that the later statement rather undermines the original.

Maybe "basic decency" is a very bad phrase to describe things here, and we should just leave it out. It's probably useful as invective, and if one is already predisposed to sympathize with the point, can galvanize one to action, but it serves poorly as a tool to actually communicate.

I propose that if we avoid it, we can talk meaningfully about how the company finds it more convenient to avoid business than comply with regulatory burdens without the distraction of moralizing the matter, and draw conclusions about whether the passage of the law was wise under these particular circumstances, or what circumstances or structure might have made it better, and the like.

Perhaps your vintage-1921 blue-collar labor dispute is more of a distraction than a help, as well :)

[lmm]

Since companies lack souls, the only way to get them to behave with decency is lawyers and paperwork and record-keeping.

[weird-eye-issue]

Is 6 months enough? Can't spots get filled between that time?

[privacylawthrow]

6 months is not compliant. Employees have to be made aware of the posting on the same calendar day the job is posted. For jobs that are in constant demand, the company has to either send a daily email or have some kind of banner on its corporate intranet.

There is also no geographic restriction so if a company has any offshore service centers, it would need to post any promotional jobs to its Colorado employees as well.

[inter_netuser]

Amazing, they have to notify about jobs in Thailand to Colorado employees?

Love it.

[rswail]

We're talking about a spreadsheet that is posted to an intranet. If someone in Colorado wants to apply for a Thailand based job and is willing to relocate for the position, then why shouldn't they know about it.

Of course, Thai employers can still discriminate on the basis of gender, sex, religion and a bunch of other things that Colorado employers can't.

And any company operating in Thailand has a local Thai company established, which would be the actual employer for the local employees. So the Colorado law would not apply.

[Mauricebranagh]

Why not? When I worked at BT they did - a nice one or two year posting abroad on full ride expat status looks good on the CV.

[ClumsyPilot]

Our promotions happen every 6 months, so position appear and are filled on that cycle.

There is also an internal jobs portal where you can search whatever you want

[syshum]

I am amazed that people do not understand that difference between Voluntary Action and Mandatory / Regulatory Burden.

A Company could 100% already being doing everything to be in compliance with a regulation and still oppose the regulation, and take actions to ensure they are bound by that regulation

[ethbr0]

Granted. But which of the following happens more often?

A) Companies oppose regulation because of filing and compliance costs, despite already doing the required behavior

B) Companies oppose regulation because they don't want to have a requirement to do and maintain the behavior

It feels like really we're talking about (B) as a primary motivator, and (A) is a smoke screen for PR palatability.

[bluGill]

Don't forget about C: companies that propose regulations because they know they can handle them and competitors cannot.

Big companies will have no problem with these regulations. However small and medium sized companies need a bunch more busy work that needs to be done and so will avoid it.

This last is hard to measure - regulations have a cost in this form but it is hard to figure out what would have been done but isn't.

[ethbr0]

A huge point!

IMHO, the US should have much more "larger than X" laws (and clauses that enfold organized subcontractors working for larger corporations).

[syshum]

Of course B primary motivator and I do not see that as a bad thing

I am not sure why you think anyone or any company would DESIRE to have external actors imposes requirements on their actions or why it would be unpalatable to say you do not want to have regulatory burdens imposes on you

As a culture have we so lost the respect for freedom and liberty that is now bad if you want to have said freedom?

[cool_dude85]

>I am not sure why you think anyone or any company would DESIRE to have external actors imposes requirements on their actions or why it would be unpalatable to say you do not want to have regulatory burdens imposes on you

Of course they desire to have external actors impose requirements on their own actions and other people's actions and other companies' actions. Just so long as they think those requirements benefit their bottom lines.

Ever hear of the business lobby opposing union-busting laws on the basis that they create regulatory burden?

[ethbr0]

Freedom and liberty to discriminate is a slippery freedom. For whom? When?

In a choice between maximizing efficiency for good actors, and curtailing behavior by bad actors, I tend to weight the latter.

[ocdtrekkie]

Only as long as Colorado is the only state with this law. If California or New York adopts it, employers will probably just accept it nationwide.

[Finnucane]

"This offer only valid in the former Confederate states, where they know how to treat labor."

[bluGill]

Though it does seem like the promotion opportunity is one that any sane company will want to have anyway. It takes some time to learn the companies internal systems, and promoting from within saves a lot of that time.

[psychometry]

Apparently now it's a "burden" to do the ethical thing because one state requires it even though you should be doing it anyway.