James C. Sharf, PhD advises employment attorneys, HR managers, and fellow industrial psychologists on developing, implementing and defending employment selection and performance appraisal procedures that minimize the risk of employment litigation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. As EEOC’s Chief Psychologist in the mid-1970s, Jim drafted the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. He later served as Special Assistant to EEOC’s Chairman for whom he drafted the “race norming” prohibition in the Civil Rights Act of 1991. He has testified as an expert witness on class certification and “job related and consistent with business necessity” rebuttal burdens in both State and Federal courts. Jim has successfully defended validity generalization (VG) in lower courts - his VG reasoning having been affirmed by the Fifth Circuit. In 2006, he was awarded the M. Scott Myers Award for Applied Research in the Workplace by the Society for Industrial/Organizational Psychology for developing the valid, legally defensible employment tests used by the Transportation Security Administration to hire fifty-thousand airport security screeners nationwide in 2002. An author of over 50 articles and chapters on fair employment, he has conducted dozens of EEO seminars and workshops with employment attorneys nationwide. His most recent text is a risk-management analysis of contemporary trends in employment class action litigation. Jim is a Fellow of both the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and the American Psychological Association.
