Age on Application forms

Tammy/Kev
True, you can never totally remove prujudice/discrimination from recruitment, but those of us enlightened enough to pick the best person for the job, regardles of the colour of their skin, age, sex etc.. will try our best to make thingas as fair as possible. I recently had an application form from a 75 year old, and the only reason he did not get a job was that his eyesight was so bad that he couldn't see the item he would be working on, and being in the aerospace sector, had to have minimum visual ability by law to do the job.

My wife was recentley made redundant and as part of her package was given acces to a consultancy who would provide advice on CV writting, interview techniques etc.
She was adviced during the CV writting phase not to provide her age, date of birth or marital staus on the CV.
However she was told to provide employment dates for her employment history on the CV !!.......... defeates the object of not providing your age me thinks!!!!

Hi Gareth. This is how the Equality and HumanRights Commission did some of it's research into discrimination at recruitment level. It is sometimes the only way to check the process. The idea for taking out ethnicity, gender, disability and age specific information is to stop people being able to make those judgements. There is a view that names should also be removed from the selection process. I think that the main point is we need to stop choosing people that reflect ourselves and let others through the door. We need to revise the ways that we make judgements about people and if making applications anonymous to a certain extent - and I accept it's not perfect - goes someway to helping get people into the interview room who otherwise might not have had a chance, then I'm all for it! I understand that the interview might then be the discriminating factor and we will never remove discrimination totally but you will give people a chance to make a good impression that might have been denied one previously!

I was warned a while ago, about the risks of bogus duplicate application forms. One would appear to be from, say, a white male in his 20's or 30's. Another almost identical form (in terms of qualifications/experience) would appear to be from, say, a femele/ethnic minority/55 year old/disabled etc.. person. If the 1st application form obtained an interview, but the 2nd did not, the person then claimed recruitment discrimination and took. or threatend to take, the company to tribunal. The company then settled out of court and paid for their mistake, people were apparrently making a living out of this.

I think many companies have age on their forms because it is historic and they haven't worked through the process of considering the alternative of using competencies rather than false perception coupled with that first impression made as someone walks into an interview. Hopefully, when the Equality Bill is established, those companies will learn how to run discrimination free recruitment campaigns, offer training to all employees - irrespective of age - and deal with performance management in a responsible manner because they won't be able to rely on the retirement age as a finish line. I'm not hopeful it will happen particularly quickly and I wouldn't advocated for an over litigious society but change does happen when people take a stand.

Thats what I thought too as the regection came back within seconds of submitting the application - Pete

I was thinking the exact same thing Gareth

I can't think why a company would need an applicants age on the application form unless this was somehow going to be part of the decision making process, which it obviously shouldn't!

If of course you believe that age discrimination has occurred.... then there are steps you can take.

I know that the CV production people don't put dates on education and past jobs for this very reason.

Thank you so much for this response

Yes it is currently legal to ask someone's age on an application form? Some organisations have taken age off application forms and moved it to their equality monitoring form for profiling. With most application forms, removing age would not be enough of a change as work history is normally requested as date specific with gaps accounted for. For a truly age free application form - which may become a requirement in the future - look at the Employers Forum on Age www.efa.org.uk/policy/steps_recruitment.asp

Is it legal to ask for age range on an application form? I recently applied for an Administrators job and the online application asked applicants to give there age range by way of tick boxes. As age discrimination is supposed to be illegal now surely this is a way of screening out applicant outside the age range the Company is ideally looking for.