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from the legal-as-long-as-you-don't-get-caught dept.
A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be "more than just a number."
Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation's capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.
ProPublica's joint investigation with The New York Times turned up instances where Verizon, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target, and Facebook placed recruitment ads "limited to particular age groups", and wrote that "using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers".
The Communications Workers of America union agreed: it filed a federal court class action lawsuit (PDF) in San Francisco claiming age discrimination on Wednesday.
[...] Some companies, including Target, State Farm and UPS, defended their targeting as a part of a broader recruitment strategy that reached candidates of all ages. The group of companies making this case included Facebook itself, which ran career ads on its own platform...
In its response, Facebook defended its own age-targeted recruitment advertisements as part of "broader-based recruitment efforts designed to reach all ages and all backgrounds". It added: "We completely reject the allegation that these advertisements are discriminatory."
Facebook wasn't the only platform found with age-targeting: Google and LinkedIn were also pinged in the investigation. LinkedIn changed its system to exclude age, Google did not.
Also reported on The Register
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:58PM
It's completely different. Posting on college campuses *does* certainly limit who sees the posting, but it's not a hard restriction and it's based on the requirements of the job. Neither of those are true of an age-based Facebook ad.
So, first of all if you post on a campus you're probably posting an entry level job that requires some degree. If you want someone with ten years of industry experience you won't get it that way. You want recent graduates because the job requires that degree, so you post to people who are about to graduate. That's just logical. Education and experience are not protected classes, you're allowed to discriminate on those. And that's what posting on a college campus is actually targeting. It does kinda create an age expectation, but that's merely a side effect. There *will* be older people seeing those ads; not every college student is some 20 year old kid.
Secondly, if you post on a bulletin board at a college, that's generally going to be a public posting. If you post an ad on the bulletin board at Starbucks, you'll only get applicants who shop at Starbucks, but that's not discrimination because anybody can walk in there. Same goes for college campuses. When I was in school I was part of the student Amateur Radio Club, and about half of our members weren't students, they were community members (most still had some kind of university affiliation, professors or service workers or something, but not students at least.) So all those people would walk through the engineering buildings every time we had a meeting, and would have seen any public posting there as well. Even the mailing lists are usually pretty open, I graduated in 2012 and I *still* occasionally get mail from some student club listservs. The university regulations specifically mandated that outside community members were allowed to join student clubs and mailing lists, so there's nothing stopping any guy off the street from walking in and joining those.