What is Adverse Impact ?
‘Adverse Impact’ is the bad outcome of any employment practice or regulation. Mostly adverse impact is found in the policies related to candidate and employee assessments.
There are many laws in place to avoid the adverse impact of these practices either intentionally or unintentionally. For example, the 4/5ths rule states that a screening technique is not suitable in case the selection rate of any group is 4/5ths the selection rate of the highest group.
Some examples of adverse impact include stating the upper limit for experience when providing a job description, which leads to the loss of older applicants with higher years of experience. Similarly, screening someone based on physical strength when the job doesn’t actually require the use of physical strength also leads to adverse impact.