Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Woman Recruited By Google Four Times and Rejected Now Joins Age Discrimination Suit

Posted by Soulskill on from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed dept.

dcblogs writes: An Ivy league graduate, with a Ph.D. in geophysics, Cheryl Fillekes, who also specializes in Linux and Unix systems, was contacted by Google recruiters four separate times over a seven year period. In each instance, she did well enough on the phone interviews to get invited to an in-person interview but was rejected every time for a job. She has since joined an age discrimination lawsuit against Google filed about two months ago by another older worker. "The amended lawsuit also alleges that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received 'multiple complaints of age discrimination by Google, and is currently conducting an extensive investigation.'"

7 of 634 comments (clear)

  1. Does indeed happen. by BrookHarty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Getting into my late 40's, I find my friends are experiencing this all over. EMC keeps contacting a buddy who is a storage architect, he designed storage hardware at sun, they never make an offer after multiple interviews, he says its because hes almost 60. Facebook keeps calling a few of my buddies, but they too never get hired and are in their 50's. I was turned down by 2 companies when they learned my age and I had a family. But I dont want to work in a sweat shop anymore, so its good to know exactly how bad some places can be. Amazon so far seems to be hiring everyone, because they burn them out quicker than they can hire.

    Yeah, people are working until retirement age now, so this is a problem. (You know, that reset button that wipes out your entire life savings called divorce)

    1. Re:Does indeed happen. by narcc · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Wouldn't the more obvious answer be "because she wanted to work for Google"?

      --
      Required reading for internet skeptics
    2. Re:Does indeed happen. by hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Which makes these companies run by idiots IMHO. I may be pushing 50 now but even when i was in my 20s I always tried to get the older guys on my team because the old guys knew how to roll with the changes and adapt. Which only makes sense, the old guys when I was in my 20s had gone from punch cards and paper tape to tape decks to the first HDDs, from time sharing to micro computers to desktops, from ASM to Fortran to Basic so they knew about change and were able to adapt.

      Compare this to the young ones where as long as nothing went wrong they were fine but heaven forbid something out of left field went wrong as they just sat there with their thumbs up their ass with no idea how to proceed. When you have had to deal with multiple OSes and form factors you learn the steps wrt basic troubleshooting and how to work their way through a problem logically. It reminds me of a story one of my colleagues used to tell about being sent down to figure out why the "new hot shot" hadn't gotten the server back up, he gets in there and the kid has got the thing practically torn down looking for blown caps or burnt traces as he was sure there HAD to be a hardware problem...there was a hardware problem alright, somebody had knocked out the power cord to the UPS.

      Are their clueless old guys? Sure but you should have those weeded out before it even gets to the one on one interviews, and if this woman had a good enough resume they called her in not twice, not thrice, but FOUR times only to reject her when they saw her? Yeah it really wouldn't be surprising if it was strictly based on age. What somebody needs to do is turn in identical resumes and send two people in, one young and one old, and have them give as close to identical answers as possible and see what happens. If they hire the 25 year old and reject the 45 year old with the same identical resumes and answers? Well it would be damned hard for them to argue anything but age discrimination.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    3. Re:Does indeed happen. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, I had an interview that went extremely well and I didn't get hired. I interviewed right before another person that was friends with people already working there. I'm sure the only reason they interviewed me was so they could meet some bs company requirement of interviewing X number of candidates before hiring.
      I had a mediocre interview another place but my former manager was best friends with the VP so I was hired.
      The people you know can matter more than qualifications.

  2. Ageism v sexism by Any+Web+Loco · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Always really interesting to see these two topics come up on Slashdot. Ageism apparently exists, sexism doesn't.

  3. Re:Commission by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Can't just be the recruiters. Someone above them has to either be actively allowing them bring people back in who have already been rejected three times before or they're just so disorganized they don't keep records on that kind of thing.

    Could be legal restrictions too.

    Not sure about USA, but here in EU, employer is legally allowed to store applicant profiles only for 6 months.

    Summary mentions four interviews during 7 years, so the earlier mention about non-selection would have expired.

  4. Re:Quite a few reasons by Daemonik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've often thought the greatest mystery in the world was how corporations convince otherwise rational people to sacrifice their lives, their health, their families all in the name of "THE TEAM" or "THE COMPANY", as if the company will ever return even 1/10th of that devotion to the employees. Corporations are the ultimate Stockholm Syndrome with some serious Manchurian Candidate brainwashing behind them.