Do the Equal Employment Opportunity regulations have specific requirements for advertising openings in apprenticeship programs?

The universal outreach and recruitment provision requires sponsors to send advance notice of all program openings to the recruitment sources on its outreach and recruitment list.  A sponsor that has continuous open enrollment should send its position postings to its recruitment sources regularly, as well as whenever there is any change to the apprentice position posting or description.  Generally speaking, a sponsor will satisfy this requirement by sending out the posting on a quarterly basis (and any time the posting changes).  When evaluating a sponsor’s compliance with this requirement, the Office of Apprenticeship will take into account circumstances in which quarterly postings may not be cost-effective (e.g., for a very small program where there are hardly any openings) or might not be sufficient (e.g., for a program that has a very large number of openings every month).

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Sponsors are allowed to select apprentices through any selection method, as long as it does not discriminate on any of the protected bases and complies with the requirements for selection devices under the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures and the Americans with Disabilities Act.  Additionally, selection methods must be uniformly and consistently applied to all applicants and apprentices and be facially neutral with respect to the protected bases. Read Selecting Apprentices for Registered Apprenticeship Programs    for more details on this topic. 

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Yes. Under 29 C.F.R. 30.10, a sponsor may give priority to qualified workers who have been waiting for openings in the program, as long as that selection procedure is applied uniformly and consistently and complies with the requirements for selection devices under the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures.

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Yes. Background checks are allowed, with a few caveats.  First, sponsors should indicate what type of background check they mean (e.g., criminal, credit, etc.) and what they mean by “passing it.”  For example, descriptions might include “no felony conviction within the last seven years,” “no drug convictions,” or “no conviction of any kind within the last five years.”

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