Mickey Silberman, the ubiquitous Jackson Lewis attorney with a gift for gab and an encyclopedic knowledge of the U.S. government’s online recruiting rules, offers employers who must comply with such rules three questions to ask themselves.

By asking themselves these questions, he says, you can reduce the number of people considered “applicants.” This can help employers better comply with the rules. (If you can show that you hired 20 women out of 25 applicants, that’s generally better than saying you hired 20 women out of 25,000 applicants.)

Anyhow, the three questions:

Are you front loading your “willingness questions?” An employer, Silberman says, “need not ‘consider’ candidates not willing to perform the job,” such as people who (depending of course on what’s needed for the specific job) aren’t willing to travel, work overtime, work weekends, or work at a specific salary. An employer could set up a special email address for applicants, he says. When candidates send in a query about a job, an employer could set up an auto-reply email asking them such “willingne