From Forum 8, and two years later, You have managers, in a large production division, making the "hearing sounds" into a phone app, requiring lots of "software development teams" and other teams necessary to "take the idea" to production, to marketing, to small sales, to large sales, to a full company, required now to abide by federal and state employment laws, to include policies and procedures for proper onboarding, training, promoting and outboarding/retiring. Your Human Relations (HR) Department has recently informed you of "things going on" in one of the production departments.

It seems one of the software development teams, all male, mostly Caucasian, some South Asian, have the lowest rate of diversity hiring, especially female, over 40, and especially persons with physical disabilities.

HRshows you a stack of excellent resumes, which were all rejected by the one software team, in question. In fact, the resumes had handwriting on them that disparaged the applicant's experience, making jokes about their training, apparent "female sounding name" or another ethnic name other than South Asian or Caucasian name. They would not know about a person's disability, except that some resumes had statements that the applicant would require a TTY device (Text telephone device), for those that are deaf, hard of hearing or speech impaired.

Moreover, since no resume had a picture and most resumes do not list graduation dates, the team manager was still able to "do the math" and figure out an applicant's age, by their work experience and those that began their software experience in early software languages. Again, those resumes were well marked up, with disparaging comments.

What are the legal issues? What is the best course of action by company leadership? What possible employment law violations has the Software Team Lead, committed, if any? What would you recommend?