Washington State.

Washington state has laws that change how recruiters are allowed to act.

Washington state makes it illegal to lie if you work in recruiting, staffing, or HR. Even by omission.

It is explicitly illegal for any “Labor Agent” (Thats anybody in HR or hiring/staffing/recruiting roles of any kind, including sourcing or third parties) to lie, misrepresent, or intentionally hide data about a job. The law itself uses the word “Fraud” in its title, and you can find that law at https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.050.

So if you feel like you’ve been bait and switched, and you’re in Washington state, then chances are that law might have been (and probably was, in our humble opinion) violated.

Washington state has a strict pay transparency law that is in effect in any online post or communication.

Washington state is one of many that has a pay transparency law, and you can find WA’s at https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.58.110 where it explicitly states that it applies to any form of online communication or recruitment. This means that if they reach out to you online, it doesn’t matter where they are from, or who they claim to represent, if they reach out to you online, or over a phone, under this law they MUST answer these questions and not doing so is explicitly illegal. It also explicitly requires a good faith pay range be placed on every posted job description, even if the job description goes online. If the job description is missing this critically mandated good faith pay range data, then you have the legal right under this law to request that data, and get it, immediately, without delay, as a response.

Washington state has effectively (but not explicitly) made non-domestic/offshore recruiters illegal.

Under the new pay transparency law that started as of 1/1/2023, it is not legal for a recruiter or staffing agent of any kind, even a third party, to not give you that title, company, or wage data when you request it after you notice it was not given, so after they first violate the law by not presenting that data the first time they contact you like they should, by not giving you the data you requested in response to that request, they are now breaking the law again, but this time in a way that the law doesn’t let you be kind about. If you want to be kind, you can just ask the question again and assume that they didn’t hear you the first time. But if they actively refuse to give you this data, then they are explicitly choosing to break the law.

So this is the law that has made offshore recruiters contacting people in Washington state to be fully illegal, because offshore recruiters based out of India or South America for example, can’t legally comply with the WA state law that mandates they actually tell the person they’re talking to what company they would be working for, what the job description would actually be, and how much they would be paid for that work, if its a contract or not, as is required by that law, so because their business model intentionally requires a lack of transparency that intentionally violates the pay transparency law of Washington state, they may not operate in Washington state.

As a result of not working with the hiring manager directly, they just won’t have the information they are legally required to present to candidates as part of Washington states pay transparency law when they contact them. And as a result of that, these offshore companies are not legally allowed to operate within Washington, because doing so while not presenting the pay rate and other required data actively violates the pay transparency law when the hiring agent does not have this data to present to the candidate.

Washington state has a thriving tech hub.

Washington state also sees growing its own tech sector as part of its own growth.

This is largely in part because of the large tech hub composed of the Seattle, Tacoma, and Redmond Triangle, As the state has learned over time that it is in its own best interests to promote the fair hiring of software engineers to assure healthy tech companies that employ them fairly and ethically, in a sustainable way.

The burden of proof is on Washington employers to prove that a credit report is needed for employment.

Under RCW https://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=19.182.020, employers cannot request applicants’ credit reports unless they can prove its legal.

Washington doesn’t allow companies to request assignment of employyes personal inventions to themselves.

In Washington state, any employment agreement that asks for the company to require the employee to assign all of their inventions and so forth to the company is unenforcable per https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=49.58.110

Washington state is a two party consent state.

Washington law makes it explicitly illegal to record others without their consent, except in a few security specific cases that are generally not relevant for employment law. You can find that law at https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=9.73.030

Washington state makes it explicitly illegal for companies to ask for project based interviews.

Under the minimum wage law of the Washington state https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary?BillNumber=1506&Year=2017, It is illegal to ask people to do free work or unpaid work. And as a result, even though it was already illegal under Federal Minimum Wage law, there is an explicit law on the books in Washington state that makes project based interviews illegal. This was passed as a civil rights law to protect minority communities from being unfairly exploited, but everybody benefits from this rule.

Washington State Requires “Garden Leave” to enforce Non-Competes.

Any company that does a layoff and tries to enforce a non compete agreement, also has to pay that employee their full salary during the entire time they wish to enforce that non compete agreement, and treat them like they are on paid time off the entire time they wany to enforce that non-compete, or the non compete agreement is null and void and unenforcable. https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.62&full=true#49.62.020.

Opinion: Typically, companies do not like paying engineers their full annual salary as part of layoffs, So non compete agreements are never enforced in Washington because they’re seen as too expensive to enforce under the law. In general, the Washington State Way is that it’s far better to treat your employees with respect and integrity so that they do not want to compete with you.

Washington state makes it explicitly illegal for companies to even ask to access your social media.

Washington state has explicitly made it illegal for employers to ask to access your social media. It doesn’t matter what the company wants to claim. There is no such thing as a company policy that allows this. You can find that law at https://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.200 Where it explicitly states that they cannot ask you to edit/remove/add posts, or even access your posts.And if they ask for your social media password, that is also explicitly illegal. If your boss accesses your social media without your consent, or steals your password, talk to a lawyer.

Notes

Intelligent readers will notice that many of these laws leverage RCW 49.44.050, and that is intentional. This law that makes misrepresentation illegal has been on the books in WA since the 1970s, and is locally considered to be very settled law.