Are the age police scouring your company’s job advertisements? By Michael Pitt, Employment Law partner.
Let me explain. It is possible that people with no intention of applying for a job with your organisation are looking through your recruitment ads to see if they fall foul of legislation outlawing ageism.
If they can persuade a tribunal that they were put off applying for the job by a discriminatory advertisement – and provided it did not emerge in evidence that they never intended to apply for the vacancy – the tribunal may decide to award them compensation.
The same could happen over job adverts that seem to indicate an intention to discriminate unlawfully on grounds of race, sex, disability, religion or sexual orientation.
Examples of discriminatory advertisements could be ones stating that an applicant must be above or below a particular age, or have a fixed amount of experience, where the age restriction or demand for experience cannot be objectively justified.
That means that employers who specifically need to attract people over or under a certain age, or with a certain amount of experience, must work out carefully, on a case by case basis, why this is so for a particular role.
Most obviously, an airline requiring flight captains would be within its rights to stipulate that applicants must have a certain number of flying hours behind them. But experience could equally be necessary for a host of other jobs.
The key is for employers to create a paper trail to show that they have thought about the type of person they want and concluded that there is no less discriminatory way to achieve the same result. This could include, for example, evidence of them regularly reviewing all their policies and procedures to make sure there is no bias against the young or old.
With such evidence behind them, employers should be immune from threats from bona fide applicants who were unsuccessful in securing the job, as well as from unscrupulous members of the public who never intended to make a serious job application in the first place.
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Notes to Editors
Pearson Hinchliffe Commercial Law is a commercial law practice providing a range of legal services to business and commercial clients in Manchester, Oldham and across the North West. The firm's specialities include Company & Commercial, Employment Law, Commercial Litigation and Commercial Property matters.
As one of the leading law firms in the North of England, Pearson Hinchliffe’s mission is to be ‘the complete law firm’ providing the highest quality legal services to its clients. It does this by offering practical and cost effective, high quality legal advice for a wide range of clients. Each client is catered for as an individual with their business and personal requirements taken into account which allows for a highly personalised service.
For more information on this article or Pearson Hinchliffe Commercial Law, please contact a member of the marketing communications team on +44 (0)161 785 3500 or email muhammed.shaikh@pearson-hinchliffe.co.uk
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