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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, @04:36PM (1 child)
Eh...I agree in general regarding supply vs demand for labor, but I'm not sure that's the only factor at play here.
If you're advertising on Facebook, expanding that demographic costs money. So they won't do it unless they expect it to result in more responses. How many people over 40 are applying to jobs through Facebook? I'd imagine if they wanted to expand their reach they'd be better spending that money on Monster, Dice, LinkedIn, or other such sites rather than just a Facebook ad.
If they've got the ad posted on a public site or a popular job search site, and that ad doesn't specify any age restrictions, then I don't think it's discriminatory if they want to advertise that posting to specific demographics. On the other hand, if the only way to find the job is through the ads they purchase, then those ads need to be purchased in a way that is not discriminatory. IMO, all they'd need to do to avoid being discriminatory is to post the job somewhere like Monster, then buy ads linking to the Monster post. That way they can spend money advertising the post where that money will be most effective, but anyone else can still easily apply if they're looking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @05:53PM
To be clear, I'm not advocating that we just throw more laws and regulations at the problem. I'm not sure what the solution is.
But I think your point still doesn't hold. Say a specific job opening has 500 potentially qualified applicants aged 40 or younger in an area and 250 potentially qualified applicants aged 41 or older. Even if the company uses your strategy - a job listing at Monster.com or Indeed.com and then buying ads for people under 40 at Facebook - they're going to have a lot more exposure to younger candidates. So instead of getting, say, 50 younger candidates and 25 older candidates they might get 50 and 12. The odds that an older person suited to the position gets into the interview process are lower. The individual solution "older people have to be more diligent in their job search" will help some, but it won't offset the general trend that favors youth.
I'm a software developer in my 40s, and I love my work. But I'm thinking of transitioning into some other field when my kids finish college. I won't have enough saved to retire, so I'll need another ten or fifteen years of work. Old teachers or old nurses are commonplace. But as a software engineer, there's a massive gap between "I enjoy learning new things even though my hair is grey" and "Convincing a potential employer I enjoy learning new things even though my hair is grey".