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| | mood of complacency
across the industry.
That’s not to say that a
random trawl of the ads
in Top Consultant shows
unreconstructed
consultancies
discriminating against
all and sundry. Indeed
most ads are impeccable
in their presentation,
with a few going so far
as to include age in
their diversity
statements.
But there is a lot
more to this law than
not mentioning age in
job advertisements. Take
specifying, say,
“bright, dynamic people
with five to seven years
of experience”. No-one
says experience is
irrelevant – but what’s
with that upper limit?
The law places great
emphasis on “objective
justification” of any
restriction or condition
that could be construed
as age related – if you
can’t demonstrate you
really need those five
years, you could be in
trouble. And what about
“bright” and “dynamic” –
could they be construed
as code words? Even
where you advertise your
vacancies could have
implications for age
discrimination.
There’s also the need
to ensure that you’re
not inadvertently
letting other people,
inside or outside your
organisation
discriminate for you.
Any older person who’s | |
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| | out of work will tell
you that the main
obstacle to getting an
interview is recruitment
agencies, to the extent
of sometimes having a
100% hit rate with
direct applications and
0% with recruiters.
From now on, you will be
responsible for the
actions of those
agencies, and if they’re
doing some crafty
filtering on your
behalf, you’d better
stop them.
You also need to be
on your guard against
discrimination, however
inadvertent, during the
in-house recruitment
process. We’re in the
early stages of this
legislation, and I
suspect a lot of people
will hardly be aware of
passing judgment on a
CV, whether considering
someone too old to take
an entry-level
consultancy job or too
young to be considered
for a partnership. Take
a look at the example of
an age-bias free
application form
available from the Age
Positive site
(http://www.agepositive.g
ov.uk) to discover the
wealth of personal and
contextual detail that
needs to be separated
off into a
“confidential” section
and used only for
monitoring purposes. My
Latin O-level, for
instance, would be a
dead giveaway.
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One of the key areas
where the Act will
affect consultancy will
be redundancy. If you
think that this may be a
minor issue, consider
that in Ireland, which
already has similar
legislation, around a
fifth of all
discrimination cases are
age-related. What will
happen to your
consultancy if the
industry suffers another
downturn and you’re
forced to lay off staff?
Will it be first-in,
last-out? Or an
opportunity to clear out
the old lags? Any such
across the board
approach could be very
costly – unless it can
be objectively
justified.
Similarly, it is
vital to look at
training, development
and promotion
opportunities to ensure
that these are not
discriminatory. Any firm
operating a formal or
informal “up-or-out”
policy will need to
revisit it very
carefully indeed.
Retirement is another
area where there will be
a great need to tread
carefully – compulsory
retirement can no longer
be set below 65, and all
employees will have a
right to request to work
on and have that request
formally considered.
Failure to follow the
statutory process will
make you liable to an | |
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| | automatic finding of
unfair dismissal – even
if there were good
reasons for not
continuing to employ the
person involved. There
will be no upper or
lower limits on
entitlement to
redundancy payments. It
is possibly to set lower
retirement ages for
partners, but this will
still require
justification.
How this will change
the consultancy industry
in the long term remains
to be seen. In the
meantime, I suspect
things will carry on
much as before, with
able candidates at all
levels being overlooked
because of their age.
Consultancy (and related
IT work) has, I suspect,
more than its share of
disappointed candidates
who feel their lack of
success is more due to
age than anything else.
I’m sure that a few of
these may well turn into
professional litigants,
submitting CVs in the
hope that they will be
rejected and can
consequently launch an
action.
Minefields generally
only become effective
when someone steps on a
mine, but once that’s
happened people
generally find that the
resulting blizzard of
body parts concentrates
the mind wonderfully.
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