A federal settlement this week is a reminder that discriminatory hiring requests do not have to originate with the employer running the job to trigger liability, and staffing platforms are the intermediary most exposed when they do not push back. The EEOC announced that WorkSmart, Inc., a Greenville, South Carolina staffing agency, will pay $150,000 and provide additional relief to settle a sex discrimination lawsuit after it filled laborer positions at a client site by excluding women from August 2020 through August 2023. The client had asked for “only male laborers,” and WorkSmart complied rather than refuse the request, according to the EEOC. The case, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, closed with the July 6 settlement.
Why it matters: staffing agencies sit on top of intake systems and vendor-management platforms that log client job requisitions verbatim, and this case shows those systems currently have no built-in check that flags a discriminatory specification before a recruiter starts sourcing against it. “Staffing agencies should not comply with discriminatory requests from their clients,” EEOC Birmingham District regional attorney Marsha Rucker said, a warning that lands squarely on the intake step, not the placement decision. It follows a separate EEOC action this year involving unlawful data collection from job applicants, underscoring that hiring-adjacent compliance failures are drawing sustained enforcement attention regardless of which party in the hiring chain commits them.
The original insight for staffing and VMS technology buyers: a requisition-intake workflow that simply records what a client asks for, without a mandatory compliance flag for facially discriminatory criteria, is now a liability surface in its own right. Agencies relying on manual recruiter judgment to catch these requests, rather than a system-level block, are one client demand away from the same exposure WorkSmart just paid for.
