US tech firm agrees to $38,000 in penalties after ‘whites only’ job ad

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A tech firm from Virginia has agreed to pay more than $38,000 in penalties after posting a job advertisement that solicited exclusively white, US-born applicants, the federal government has announced. Arthur Grand Technologies drew the scrutiny of anti-discrimination officials when it went on the hiring site Indeed.com in March 2023 and published an ad aiming to fill a business analyst vacancy while limiting applicants to “Only US Born Citizens [white] who are local within 60 miles from Dallas”. “[Don’t share with candidates],” the information technology services company’s advertisement, which was in bold text, added. Social media users and news outlets circulated the posting widely, prompting many to express shock that a job ad would so openly flout protections of nondiscrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin, among other categories. Within two months, the US justice department’s civil rights division opened an investigation into Arthur Grand. The company by Thursday had agreed to pay a $7,500 civil penalty to the US treasury as well as a total of $31,000 to people who filed discrimination complaints with the federal labor department over the job ad, a government news release said. Arthur Grand must also train its workers on the Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibits discrimination based on citizenship status as well as national origin in hiring, firing or recruiting prospective employees. And the company said it would revise its employment policies while subjecting itself to justice department monitoring. A statement from the assistant US attorney general Kristen Clarke said it was “shameful … to see employers using ‘white only’ and ‘US born’ job postings to lock out otherwise eligible job candidates of color” at this point in the nation’s history. “I share the public’s outrage at Arthur Grand’s appalling and discriminatory ban,” Clarke’s statement added. In a statement reported by CNN, Arthur Grand’s chief executive officer, Sheik Rahmathullah, explained that “an upset employee on a performance improvement plan” published the notorious hiring advertisement without permission from a personal email address and account. skip past newsletter promotion Sign up to Headlines US Free newsletter Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning Enter your email address Sign up Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy . We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion The justice department’s news release added that its investigators determined a recruiter working for Arthur Grand’s subsidiary in India created the advertisement – for a position whose listed clients were HTC Global in Michigan and Berkshire Hathaway in Nebraska – and then posted it on Indeed. Arthur Grand, in a previous statement, said that the employee had grabbed an existing job posting and then introduced “discriminatory language” before publishing it on Indeed. “Upon discovering this, we took immediate and decisive action to ensure that this type of incident will never happen again, including the immediate termination of the responsible employee,” Rahmathullah said in the statement to CNN. Despite the financial penalties that Arthur Grand has accepted, Rahmathullah said his company “vehemently denies any guilt or wrongdoing in relation to the discriminatory job posting”.