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Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

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Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#101

Post by mulmen »

Karunamon wrote: post #72
mulmen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is real, these are advertisements for jobs . It's not a game. Laws still apply. Discrimination still isn't legal. Just because you read it on a computer screen instead of on a dead tree carcass does not change the rules.

Who said it was a game or laws don't apply? Please reply to what I actually wrote in its entirety, not what you want me to have written. If you were seizing on "real world", I think it's pretty clear I meant "physical" rather than "virtual" since we're comparing newspapers to online ads, but I updated the post to clarify.

You edited your post, I replied to what you said.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#102

Post by markbnj »

danso wrote: post #3
derekp7 wrote: post #2

Is this different than advertising in a magazine that has a specific reader demographic? Or would that get a company in trouble too, if a the court rules that the intent was to exclude a given group?

It's against U.S. federal law for employers to discriminate against people aged 40-or-over on the basis of age. Having job ads that only younger people could see would seemingly fall afoul of that law: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/adea.cfm

If they post the job opportunity on many different sites is it discrimination if one of those sites targets a specific age group? I'm a 57 year-old steadily employed software engineer/SRE so I am definitely in favor of less age discrimination :). I get that FB is a huge market, but for professionals LinkedIn and Indeed are probably just as important.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#103

Post by jklinger410 »

mulmen wrote: post #79
jklinger410 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are constantly complaining that Facebook allows you to target ads at certain people. Ads have operated this way since their inception, yet critics are finding new ways to make it seem like Facebook is ruining everything by doing exactly what any sensible person would do if they ran Facebook. I am not a huge fan of Facebook. But I feel like this is the same trope as was hauled out in the "Facebook didn't tell m…

This post is about illegal discrimination, not an undesirable result of a ranking algorithm.

This post is about targeting ads at certain demographics. Those ads happen to be for jobs.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#104

Post by imh »

I once worked at a company that was having trouble finding women candidates. We were a tiny company that at that point largely recruited out of the people we knew, who were largely people we'd worked with before and people we went to school with. Mostly dudes. There was a discussion at some point about the legality of trying harder to get women engineers than men. My understanding is that you can try to get more people of a protected class to apply in the first place and it's only once they apply that you have to treat everyone equally. Is that correct?

If it is, then this seems like the problem in the article would be legal on the same basis.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#105

Post by gumby »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #21
danso wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's against U.S. federal law for employers to discriminate against people aged 40-or-over on the basis of age. Having job ads that only younger people could see would seemingly fall afoul of that law: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/adea.cfm

So they can pay to show the ads to job seekers 40+ but not hire them. Facebook makes more money, and they get to say they did some social good. Seems like they should be advocating (at least in this use case) to stop the discrimination to increase profits.

Well of course they could, just as people advertise jobs or loans to black people and then magically never hire / approve them. There are mechanisms for finding this -- just because it is possible to do, doesn't mean it's legal or fair.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#106

Post by user5994461 »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #34

It's anecdata, but if I ask my teen daughter, Facebook is for older people, and the kids are all using things that I've never even heard of. So not sure how you can really prove discrimination. There is some demographic skewing if you advertise on Facebook vs. other channels, but not sure you can really call it an age issue. Not sure what to make of the social marketing guy in the article -- seems like if you are loo…

For those wondering, the new cool things are snapchat and instagram.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#107

Post by draw_down »

combatentropy wrote: post #66

It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? I have heard that companies like recent grads because they are (1) more malleable and (2) can be paid less. But neither of those reasons seem to me strong enough. I'm talking completely about the company's own interests. Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the co…

Labor costs. Labor costs.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#108

Post by mulmen »

jklinger410 wrote: post #103
mulmen wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post is about illegal discrimination, not an undesirable result of a ranking algorithm.

This post is about targeting ads at certain demographics. Those ads happen to be for jobs.

Exactly, and job seekers over 40 are a protected class, so this is illegal discrimination.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#109

Post by 015UUZn8aEvW »

user5994461 wrote: post #94
015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #67

I'm a grad student at an elite American university. Several weeks ago, some other students and I attended a recruiting presentation put on by a large multinational company I won't name. The woman who gave the presentation services her company's contract with a tech company, that, let's just say, has a big share of the search engine market. She emphasized that she was looking for diversity, because, as she said, "the…

>>> I'd like to start a business in 3 or 4 years, and I'm seriously considering going out of my way to target people like him. It'll be my competitive advantage. He could be 10 times more expensive than you. Did you consider that?

I know the local pay scale pretty well. He was out of work for a while, and he definitely would have taken a salary equivalent to what I was making.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#110

Post by mulmen »

cjhopman wrote: post #97
mulmen wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This form of discrimination is illegal. Do you think Facebook is above the law? The pricing structure does not change the applicability of anti-discrimination laws.

Is advertising for employment in Snapchat then also illegal? Their user base skews younger. What if this bias in who the ad is displayed to algorithmically determined. If only users >40 click on the ads, and then the ad system stops showing the ad to users <40, is that illegal?

Advertising jobs based on age is illegal regardless of the platform.

e: I should have clarified the type of advertisement.

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