2006 Age Discrimination Act and Recruitment

On 1st October 2006, a new Age Discrimination Act came to pass.

This has ramifications of how you are allowed to advertise your jobs on creativepool and how we are allowed to collect data about our users.

You will notice one big change on creativepool. We have now removed the 2 fields from our users profiles, years experience and years freelancing. At present this may be interpreted to be covered as being descriminatory by the Act however we are taking legal advice and will be in contact if things change.

The main issue with any new Act is that there is no case law in place. Therefore we all need to ensure that we are extremely careful in these early stages until tighter parameters are set over what we can and can't do.

The Act - A rough guide

As far as recruitment goes under the Act - this can be broadly summarised as:

• Base your decisions about recruitment on the skills required to do the job. Provide training to help those making judgements to be objective and avoid stereotyping people because of their age.
• Remove dates of birth from your application forms.
• Don’t ask for GCSE results - as this differentiates between a GCSE generation, and an O Level generation.
• Do not ask for a specific number of years’ experience in job adverts.
• Avoid using language that might imply that you would prefer someone of a certain age, such as mature, young or energetic.
• Don’t ask anything age-related in interview at all.

Shortlisting and Record Keeping

At each stage of the recruitment process, check that no bias, deliberate or unintentional, has influenced decisions. In all organisations this check should be carried out by someone who has not been involved in the shortlisting. In all instances, you should record your decisions and retain these records, ideally for 12 months.

More information

I am no expert and am only passing on these tips to our users. The information has been passed in good faith. However for a better understanding and a more complete picture and information these resources will help:

The Directgov website
Direct.gov.uk - Discrimination at work

The ACAS website
http://www.acas.org.uk/

Age Positive website
http://www.agepositive.gov.uk/