Inherent Requirements

To avoid discrimination employers must assess applicants on their ability to perform the inherent requirements of the position they are applying for.

Inherent requirements are the essential activities of the job: the core duties that must be carried out in order to fulfil the purpose of a position. They do not refer to all of the requirements of a job, but rather contrast with peripheral or non-essential tasks, which may be negotiable and flexible.

Inherent requirements relate to results, or what must be accomplished, rather than means, or how it is accomplished.

Examples

• An inherent requirement of a storeman's job is to move packages. How the employee moves the packages is not relevant and therefore not an inherent requirement.
• Airline crews seldom have to perform emergency landings and evacuations; however, because the consequences of being able to do this are so important, the ability to perform these tasks in an emergency may be set out as inherent requirements.
• If a job involves only occasional photocopying, an applicant who has difficulty photocopying because of a disability should not be disqualified from consideration, providing they are able to fulfill the inherent requirements. The occasional photocopying would be a peripheral rather an inherent requirement and alternative arrangements could be made (for example, a colleague could do the photocopying in return for some other task the applicant could perform).
• The Queensland Anti-Discrimination Tribunal found that a train driver with colour vision deficiency was capable of doing his job safely because train signals could be identified correctly by position rather than colour. This decision focussed on the inherent requirement of safety rather than on the method of interpreting signals.

Regularly updating job descriptions so that they remain abreast of current processes and technologies is an important task often overlooked by employers. This affects people with disabilities when tasks that are not essential to the job are included in the job description as core duties or when outdated processes for completing tasks are described.

This is an area that HR Professionals should always scrutinise in order to ensure they recruit the right candidate. When evaluating job descriptions or making recruitment decisions based on what is essential to a particular position, think about the job description, ensuring it details tasks, not methods of doing them. Ascertain whether the employer will consider task completion as a team effort. And, in the case of a particularly skilled applicant, see if the employer will attempt to be innovative and find untried but better ways of completing tasks.

Every job needs to be looked at in an open manner. There may be many ways of performing the inherent requirements of a job other than the 'normal' way or the way in which the job has been done in the past.