Age Discrimination in Recruitment: Hiring Practices to Avoid

It’s very likely that much of your talent pool consists of older workers.  According to a recent study from Pew Research, close to 20% of Americans age 65 or older (that’s a total of nearly 9 million people) are still working.  It’s more expensive these days to live a comfortable lifestyle, parents are spending much of their savings on their children’s college educations, and people are living longer today than years ago.  But age discrimination in recruitment exists today, and it has a negative impact on the livelihood of baby boomers as well as younger workers.  Fear of age discrimination can also discourage workers from applying to jobs they are qualified for.

Age discrimination is illegal under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which “protects certain applicants and employees forty years of age and older from discrimination on the basis of age in hiring, promotion, discharge, compensation, or terms, conditions, or privileges of employment.”  While age discrimination in hiring is difficult for job seekers to prove, the website for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows that the number of age discrimination claims has been steadily growing since 1997.  Besides that, by engaging in age discrimination in the recruitment process, you are shortchanging your business.  Baby boomers have proven to be a very hard-working generation who hold a lot of loyalty to their employers and aren’t likely to quit their job at the drop of a hat.  They are also known for being resourceful, independent and disciplined.

How Hiring Managers Display Age Discrimination

You may think this isn’t an issue in your human resources team, because you employ ethical people.  But age discrimination in hiring isn’t necessarily intentional.  Your hiring managers may have bias towards older workers that they aren’t even aware of.  Age discrimination can exist in all parts of the hiring process, from job ads to resume screening to interviewing.  It’s also important to note that age discrimination in recruitment can apply to younger workers as well, especially in situations where you are requesting a certain number of years’ experience.  In this case, you could be missing out on talent that has developed their skills rapidly.  And you don’t have to be age 65 or older to be deemed too old to perform the job in question.  Even people in their 30s can lose job opportunities to younger applicants.

How to Avoid Age Discrimination in the Recruitment Process

To keep age discrimination at bay during recruitment, it’s important that your HR team reviews the qualifications of job candidates in groups.  That way, you can point out possible age bias to each other along the way.  It helps to have multiple eyes and ears because age discrimination can easily be missed in the recruitment process.  Some of the assumptions hiring managers have that cause them to be afraid to hire older workers are lack of aptitude with technology, lack of flexibility, that they will be difficult to train, and that they will be retiring soon.  To avoid age discrimination in the hiring process, it’s important that you destroy these cultural ideas among your hiring team.  For example, not hiring a worker because you are afraid they will decide to retire after a year or two on the job is bad logic because in today’s job market, millennials are known to job hop.  You could end up having to find a replacement even sooner by choosing to hire a younger worker.

To avoid age discrimination in the hiring process, here are some things you should watch out for:

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Age Discrimination in Recruitment: Hiring Practices to Avoid
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To avoid age discrimination in the hiring process, here are some things you should watch out for: 1) Wording in your job postings 2) Mentioning the person’s age or referring to aspects of their age that could make the job challenging…
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Employment Alert
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