When you’re applying for a job, you want to know that you’ll be reviewed for your abilities, not on your age, gender or other irrelevant feature. When you are judged based on your age, for instance, then this can be a type of discrimination that you could seek compensation for.
A case involving this type of discrimination was recently in the news when a 64-year-old accused Google of giving a job to another interviewer because of his age. The man claims in his complaint that the application he filed was unfairly dismissed in 2011 when he was only 60. He had work experience at IBM, General Dynamics and Compaq.
Google has claimed that it decided not to hire the man after a brief phone interview. This was despite telling him that he would be a great candidate and that the company was embarking on a large recruiting campaign. The man has filed an age-discrimination lawsuit against Google along with other job applicants over the age of 40 who were not hired by Google.
Google believes that the case will show that it has done nothing wrong, but some statistics from a workforce information site does show that Google’s average working age of 29 in 2013 was far lower than the average age of 43 for computer programmers. Google also has the sixth youngest workforce of all the tech companies surveyed, 22 in total, according to the data.
Previously, Google has also been accused of age discrimination when a former executive for the company claimed that the company called him an old fuddy duddy and told him his ideas were too old to matter. The case was settled.
Source: Wall Street Journal, “Google Sued by Job Candidate for Age Discrimination,” Joeli Brearley, April. 23, 2015
