If you are an employer or responsible for making hiring decisions, you need to fully understand the ramifications of age discrimination. You can risk serious repercussions if you are found liable for discriminating someone due to his or her age. The following are some things to consider when you are making a hiring decision without inadvertently discriminating:
What Is Age Discrimination?
The first thing you should know when you are in charge of making hiring decisions is what constitutes age discrimination. Age discrimination happens when an employer makes a decision about an employee solely based on his or her age. This holds true for hiring job applicants as well. To help prevent this, be sure to have a strict age discrimination policy in place. Also, you should hold regular training sessions with your hiring staff to make sure they understand the elements of age discrimination.
You may also want to hold training sessions for all employees as well. Be sure you have employees in all age ranges participate in the training sessions to be certain everyone fully understands what is not acceptable with regard to age.
Once everyone fully understands age discrimination, it will be easier to catch it quickly and avoid any possible lawsuits or other problems.
What Should You Consider When Hiring Employees?
While a prospective employee may be near the age of a typical retiree, he or she may end up being with your company longer than someone younger who wants to continue to advance his or her career, which is a benefit to you. Also, you should consider a variety of methods when you are vetting job applicants to ensure you are getting the best person for the job, despite his or her age. If you are not doing the interviews yourself, be sure the interviewers understand all aspects of age discrimination law. In addition, be sure you place your job applications where anyone can access them.
Once you completely understand age discrimination and utilize these tips to reduce the likelihood of it occurring in your organization, you should find it easy to hire based on experience and merit rather than age. You may even want to pair employees in a variety of age ranges to help utilize their collective experience to ultimately achieve the desired goal. This will help devalue age and place more emphasis on the capability of completing a given task.
If you find yourself in legal trouble due to you or someone in your organization acting in a way which is viewed as age discrimination, be sure to retain counsel as quickly as possible to ensure you have a solid defense, particularly if you believe the claim is unfounded. Get in touch with a law firm that offers age discrimination law services to learn more.
