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Online Job Sites May Block Older Workers (cnbc.com)
Joe_Dragon quotes a report from CNBC: Older Americans struggling to overcome age discrimination while looking for work face a new enemy: their computers. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan recently opened a probe into allegations that ageism is built right into the online software tools that millions of Americans use to job hunt. Separate research published recently by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank found that in a widespread test using fabricated resumes, fictional older workers were 30 percent less likely to be contacted after applying for jobs. Fictional older women had it even worse, being 47 percent less likely to get a "callback." Several forces are conspiring to ensure that many Americans have to work well past the traditional retirement age of 65. People are living longer, their retirement savings are inadequate, and Social Security reforms are almost certainly going to require it. The San Francisco Fed says that the share of the older-65 working population is projected to rise sharply -- from about 19 percent now to 29 percent in the year 2060. Online job-hunting tools should be making things easier for older employment seekers, and it can. Indeed.com, which claims to list 16 million jobs worldwide, currently lists 158,000 openings under its "Part Time Jobs, Senior Citizen Jobs" category. Monster.com, which claims 5 million listings, has a special home page for "Careers at 50+." In other ways, however, online job sites can cut older workers out. Age bias is built right into their software, according to Madigan. Job seekers who try to build a profile or resume can find that it's impossible to complete some forms because drop-down menus needed to complete tasks don't go back far enough to let older applicants fill them out. For example, one site's menu options for "years attended college" stops abruptly at 1956. That could prevent someone in their late 70s from filling out the form. Madigan's office said it found one example that only accommodated those who had attended school after 1980, "barring anyone who is older than 52." Other sites used dates ranging from 1950 to 1970 as cutoffs, her office said. The Illinois' Civil Rights Bureau has opened a probe into potential violations of the Illinois Human Rights Act and the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Madigan's office has sent inquiry letters to six top jobs sites: Beyond.com, CareerBuilder, Indeed Inc., Ladders Inc., Monster Worldwide Inc. and Vault.
I've seen it before. Executive has hard validation set somewhere around the 90% cutoff rather than the 99.99999% cutoff and then you get cases where the validation just doesn't work.
Even the ACC doesn't know better yet.
Older applicants want more money. Older applicants have families, so it's harder to get them to stay late, or engage in team building exercises after hours.
Almost everything blocks older workers to some degree, usually significant.
Just as we've been telling everyone for years.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you didn't save your money and have to work past 50... good luck.
This sounds like gross incompetence rather than malevolence. Dropdown boxes are not the correct tool for entering numbers or dates. Month and weekday? Fine, they're constrained to under 20 options. Year or day of month? That's bad design.
Most people only go 2, 4, or 6, sometimes a couple more. I suppose not supporting people who have gone to college for 1957 years is age discrimination for someone, but even Methuselah only lived to be 969.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You Libs sold it to the public in the 30's. Now it's failing. Why?
accommodated those who had attended school after 1980, "barring anyone who is older than 52."
That's 37 years ago. Someone who is 52 now was 15 in 1980.
The claim in the summary is exactly equivalent to the obviously false statement "No one older than 15 attends school."
the millennials might need a job. or not.
Age discrimination in general is a problem. This is not. If your formal education on basically any topic is more than 20 years old, it isn't relevant. It only makes sense to hire somebody like that if they have recent work history.
hang them by the neck until dead
1956 seems like a pretty arbitrary starting point. Then again, it's 'their' little search site, they can be as arbitrary as anyone else until legislated/litigated otherwise.
I'm not defending age discrimination but rather emphasizing the only real market-based defense against discriminating short-sighters : vote with your wallet/shoes.
Can't wait to see how many billions of dollars these companies are fined.
As over 50 the discrimination is rampant.
If you're over 50 they find an excuse to get rid of you.
Everyone I know was gotten rid of with extreme prejudice at that age.
Nothing is being done about it and it is never taken up by media or the political parties and yet next to ethnic discrimination the single largest discrimination issue in this country.
I applied to many thousands of job and interviewed at hundreds before I got the handful of low paying positions that don;t even cover costs after fifty and I'm highly qualified for many types of work, am in good health, good personality, highly intelligent, and reasonable youngish looking for my age.
I can only guess it is related to healthcare costs and that most positions ask for the moon these days.
Who wants to go to a homo party after work with pimple faced nerds when the hot missus is waiting?
an ill wind that blows no good
Depending on how the data is stored (a formated string date will behave somewhat differently than an integer) asking a typical web coder to make a form compliant for dates prior to the Linux Epoch may be well beyond their abilities.
Captcha: Additive
I've been 29 for most of a decade.
You know you have to set the XX year to some point and some on line job systems suck
http://taleosucks.blogspot.com...
lower the SS age or at least the medicare age.
Why not just have a single player system.
In some they don't like people who like team play. As that is because team players are more likely to join unions.
Yes test like that for retail jobs but you do see them in office and tech jobs.
Of course, pointing that out only makes your problem worse.
The government has rules to protect individuals in protected classes. Individuals over 40 are in a protected class and cannot be discriminated against in job interviews, promotions, etc. How does private industry address the issue of age discrimination?
Workers of all ages are being actively replaced by H1B Visa workers for a fraction of the price.
Remember all these companies who can't find qualified workers?
They're busy laying off americans so they can hire more H1B's
http://www.edd.ca.gov/jobs_and_training/warn/WARN-Report-for-7-1-2016-to-03-10-2017.pdf
My main talent is using tools to solve problems
Over the years, I have accumulated many tools..software development, circuit design, woodworking, metalworking, many construction skills, artistic skills and many more
I'm still getting paid very well to write software and design circuits
Young people ask.."how do you keep up on new languages?"
I answer, I program in C and C++, it's the best choice for embedded systems. Wanna talk about learning?
My latest project was on a new processor (~1900 page datasheet), a new OS, and 10-20 new components, communicating through nontrivial hardware adapters
Yeah, I can keep up with the young guys
It seems odd that they don't realize this
what matters is the aggregate, and in the aggregate older people work less and are less productive. There's no good reason for a hiring manager to take a chance on you when there's a dozen young guys lined up who, odds are can work just as much as you do and don't have that risk.
And there's no such thing as illegal if the law's not enforced.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I haven't put dates to my educational history in 20-+ years. I haven't included employment history further than 7 years for at least that long.
Since employers aren't really permitted to ask your age (AEDA), they shouldn't until it's time for as background check, and if they are big enough they should let HR/Personnel handle that information without revealing it to the hiring individual or team.
Wow. This is an anti-discrimination class-action suit waiting for a sponsor. Forcing dates out of you is forced age disclosure, and illegal.
Illegal. And it's not even new. Not surprising though.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Why don't all you old people start your own company and only hire old people? Those under 40 are not a protected class. With all the collective experience you would have you should be able to compete against the big boys.
Of course you validate authoritatively on the server. Prevalidation on the client exists so that finding the most common data entry errors doesn't require a round trip to the server and a full page reload.
Age-related cognitive decline is a medical reality. It is also common.
It does not hit everyone equally, and it may not have hit you at all. But the reality that employers face is that older workers are much more likely to be suffering from cognitive decline than younger workers, which will absolutely reduce their quality of work.
It is still illegal to discriminate on this basis. But, despite this, employers have a direct and compelling reason to break this law. Breaking this law can significantly improve the company's bottom line.
So if they can find a way to weasel out of this non-discrimination requirement, they absolutely will.
The current mind set is that if it's NOT the end employer or a government agency just about anything is A-OK... It's never been tested in a court and until it is, private entities will continue to do as they damned well please. Hence Uber-gate like occurrences (I'm talking about running self operating machines without proper clearance "We don't HAVE to! Oops, yes we do. We're sorry").
sigh, we seem to have lost the idea that just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
"Never attribute to malice that which may be adequately explained by incompetence:
I believe in many cases this is likely not direct age discrimination but just naive, lazy programmers and lax QA testers.
It's likely the drop down boxes are a result of developers given incomplete data sets and don't think far enough ahead, or don't care.
I switched tech jobs at 50 with zero problems. The vast majority of my peers (director level and above tech management) are 40+. There's always room for good people.
I am a manager. People in my team are aged between 23 and 27. They understand each other, they share cultural themes and speak the same language. Hiring someone older than 40 would instantly destroy that balance: there would be a barrier between the older worker and the rest of the team leading to reduced performance. Should we hire another 24-years old they would fit in instantly. Beyond 30? Forget it. Take this into account when you advocate taking older workers in: they can't fit in, literally, and when they try they're pathetic. Their best years are gone, their best work is behind them. They know it and the team knows it. Their experience - especially in IT - does not make up, sorry. As a private business we will hire exactly the people who can fit in and work to our standards, and that's it.
"Several forces are conspiring to ensure that many Americans have to work well past the traditional retirement age of 65."
I think you mean "JEWS". Who runs the Federal Reserve? Who runs the government?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcd-yvudYSg
1956 is 61 years in the past. If you were particularly precocious, then you might have attended university from age 15, so if you can't enter your university dates then you're at least 76 here. That's well past mandatory retirement age in pretty much any locale that has such a thing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What does it matter what years you were in college. And resumes shouldn't list your age. If you want to remove the age bias, remove those fields. Though showing a work history of 30 years is going to show you're older, age shouldn't be on there.
... and this will only make him to close both businesses and move to China. As if Canada wasn't fucked enough ...
Fiber to the House please!
categories are discriminatory in and of themselves, what bullshit. Anyone qualified should be able to be considered for any job. Someday Silicon Valley will learn the hard way that it doesn't rule the world.
Jesus Christ, I knew that there were laws against age discrimination, but I did NOT know about the over 40 crowd being a "protected class". I guess that means that the only people in the United States who can be legally fucked over on a whim are heterosexual, atheistic white men under age 40 who are not veterans and have no disabilities? Did I miss any further subdivision that might be "special"?
And they wonder why the so-called "Alt Right" is thriving within this demographic? Rejecting "political correctness" and "social justice" bullshit seems like a natural response when you've been marginalized to the point where you are part of a small minority which doesn't have "special" legal status.
Yeah. Plenty of age discrimination for older workers.
Try to apply for some companies, they demand year of degree - good way to figure out your age there for many people.
Or some blatantly ask for your birth date including year.
Then one is declared "overqualified" which is a code word for "too old"
Then the ACA has its Cadillac Tax. If your premium cost is above a certain amount, 40% higher health care costs. People in their late 50's get 20K premiums for crap insurance with $10K deductible. Cadillac tax for you!
That federal law encourages age discrimination.
The second they find out you're over 30 years old, your profile immediately disappears from their site.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Yeah, maybe a married guy doesn't feel like cruising the strip joints, crawling the pubs, and getting home 2:30 AM totally plastered. WTF is "team building exercises after hours" tolerated at all? If an MBA can't find a "beer-buddy" without threatening to fire subordinates who won't come along, they need psychiatric help.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user