Web-Only Recruitment for Broadcast, Pay-TV Jobs Not Enough, FCC’s Pulley Says
Broadcasters and pay TV must go beyond the Web to recruit staff, an FCC official overseeing equal employment opportunity rules said. It’s still not enough under EEO rules to recruit only online, the Media Bureau’s EEO head, Lewis Pulley, told the first-ever commission event on the regime. Broadcast lawyers said their clients would prefer to use job-search and classifieds websites over daily newspapers, who they see as competing with them for local ads. Pulley noted there’s no requirement for TV and radio stations and multichannel video programming distributors to buy ads in papers.
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Stations with more than five full-time employees and MVPDs with more than six must undertake other “initiatives,” said Pulley and Cassandra Queen, a bureau staffer who works on EEO issues. They spoke at Wednesday’s “EEO best practices summit,” in the commission’s Washington headquarters (http://goo.gl/pdqGy).
More notices of apparent liability for alleged violations are coming, after two were issued Friday, Pulley said of the proposed fines that included one against Clear Channel (CD Jan 3 p8). “We have issued NALs every year since 2005. And we have more coming,” he said. “We have some things that are pretty far along. So more will be coming for 2012.” Among commission officials overseeing EEO compliance, “a lot of our concerns are the websites” of licensees, Queen said: “We have a difficult time sometimes finding the websites, or the EEO file on the websites” and must call the company or its attorney to find the site. They sometimes “don’t respond to us,” or take “months, sometimes years” to reply, she said: “That’s been difficult” and “that is our pet peeve."
There are 16 different types of initiatives the FCC deems sufficient for licensees to meet the employment rules, Pulley and Queen said: They include job fairs, staffer training and taking employees -- such as a TV station’s meteorologist -- to schools. Other recruitment initiatives recognized by the agency are scholarship programs and “joint efforts with other groups,” said a handout by panelist Melodie Virtue of Garvey Schubert. Recruitment efforts are “not just window dressing,” said Lerman Senter’s Jenell Trigg: A “productive recruitment plan” is necessary. There seems to be some confusion among MVPDs and broadcasters about what constitutes an initiative, Pulley said. Queen doesn’t think that some “take the initiative part seriously,” she said: “Because a lot of the time, that information is omitted from the report” to the agency.
It may be time for the agency to see if Monster.com and other job listings sites suffice as ways to fill vacant positions, said broadcast lawyer David Oxenford of Davis Wright. The goal of the commission’s rules is to ensure “you're not using the old boys’ network for recruiting,” he noted: “Get the information out widely to all groups within a community.” EEO reports show that the Internet works for drawing applicants who are ultimately hired, Pulley said. “We are aware that a lot of people use the Internet for recruiting,” he said. “We know that there are Internet sources that are highly productive."
It’s high time for Internet recruiting, Trigg said, because newspaper ads aren’t always working. “The broadband opportunity has become a change from when this rule was adopted in 2002,” she said of the EEO regulations. “It is long overdue for the FCC to allow broadcasters to manage their recruitment programs in the most efficient manner.” Virtue said the likes of Craigslist and allaccess.com “sometimes are the only places where stations get candidates they want to hire, who are qualified, and they get nothing from the newspaper.” It may be time for someone to petition the agency to be able to use Internet sources as a substitute for job listings elsewhere, Virtue said. “It’s not something that we are inclined to revisit, unless we have some specific reason to,” Pulley said. “I've heard no specific request” to change the requirement, he said: “But we encourage you to use the Internet” for hiring.
Internet job listings can’t reach some areas, FCC officials and broadcast and cable industry executives said. “In Vermont, we struggle with Internet access in much of the state,” so Vermont Public Radio reaches job-seekers through two newspapers that serve much of the state, said VPR’s Laurie Kigonya. “We do use the Internet a lot as far as the CPB and NPR job line,” though, said the VPR human resources supervisor. Charter Communications lists all openings on a VOD channel that any video subscriber can view, Associate General Counsel Cheryl Manley said. “Individuals who may not have access to the Internet, they do have access to see the jobs on demand,” she said. “They don’t have to be a subscriber to any of our premium channels.”
Public broadcasters’ existing work with various groups on programming and other matters can be used to look for employees, said Corporation for Public Broadcasting Deputy General Counsel Robert Winteringham. “It isn’t just the [news]paper, it isn’t just the Internet, it is strategic partnering with various organizations,” he said of “constant partnering with public institutions in the communities that we serve.” FCC Office of Communications Business Opportunities Chief Thomas Reed noted that “at least a third of the country that is not online” at home. He asked broadcast and cable executives how they reach such people. Shelters, focusing on veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, community events like picnics and on-air announcements were some of the ways the executives said their organizations undertook recruitment.
Twenty-one NALs have proposed fines totaling $254,000 and covering 75 stations, Pulley said. “We have discovered a number of violations through that process” of reviewing materials submitted by licensees, he said. “Our main tools for enforcing the rules is random audits” covering 5 percent of broadcasters and MVPDs annually -- hundreds of stations and dozens of systems. License renewals are another way the FCC finds possible EEO violations, Pulley said. “We can also respond to complaints from any source notifying us of possible violations. We can also discover violations on our own.” Because “we are not the police, we do not need probable cause” to investigate, he continued. “We have investigated people because we have just happened to be looking at a website for some reason, or because of an interesting news story.”