OREANDA-NEWS. January 27, 2016. Which of the many employment law risks in onboarding keeps HR pros up at night? State and municipal legislation leads the list, according to the attendees at one of our recent webinars.

Not far behind on the most-worrisome list: wage and hour concerns and the new emphasis on “systemic issues” by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (see graphic below).Employment law, onboarding, and legal risks

That’s what we learned from a live poll during a recent webinar on the subject of onboarding and legal risk. We asked the nearly 300 attendees to tell us which risk caused them the most concern.

Guest speaker Chad Richter, partner at Jackson Lewis, talked about such employment law issues as the EEOC’s recent activities, the increasing power of employees themselves in employer litigation, and class action lawsuits against employers.

I joined Chad and together we talked about a number of other key trends in labor law for onboarding, including state-level regulations and the pitfalls for multi-state employers. We talked about the many new wage notification requirements, for example.

I also told the attendees about a recent study we did on minimum wage laws. Based on unique data resources at Equifax (The Work Number®) we looked at pay data from 1,700 companies with an average of 11,000 hourly employees to assess the payroll impact of the many new minimum wage laws. The impact will run to a billion dollars in 2016.

I also explained how you can turn onboarding into a bottom line contributor. Sure you want onboarding to be as risk-free as possible. But do you know how dramatic the bottom line impact can be if you make WOTC screening an integrated part of onboarding?