A few weeks ago, my Facebook ads changed considerably. Suddenly, I was getting ads for Walmart and Target home delivery service. I live in Switzerland where, sadly, neither store exists. I clicked on “why am I getting this ad?” and it informed me that the ad was Targeted to me because I lived in Pennsylvania.
Well, I did live in Pennsylvania–nine years ago. These Pennsylvanian ads continued for a few weeks, and then something happened at Facebook and I was back to my normal Swiss focused ads.
It turns out that while Facebook stopped businesses from targeting job seekers by race or gender, it still allows companies to indicate an age. And at 45, I may be too old to see certain job postings.
To keep reading, click here: If You Think There Are Not a Lot of Jobs Out There, It May Be that You Are Too Old to See the Ads
I once read several HR texts in the company library that recommended that HR hire to maintain an average age of 40 in the workforce, except in tech, where it should be 35. Imagine that people would work from college graduation at 22 until at most age 48, for a workforce evenly balanced at 35. Employees would have 26 years to “pay their dues,” advance, pay off their college loans, have kids, and save for golden years that begin 18 years before American Social Security kicks in (plus enough to supplement it until age 90 or so.) Businesses still base policies on that silly notion while economists recommend that people work past age 65. What are tweeners – over mid 40’s and undesirable but under mid-60s and too young to retire – to do? Skills based resumes and lifelong learning hardly scratch the surface of this problem.
But, by limiting age specifically, you are also eliminating people returning to the workforce or people who are attempting to change career paths.
YES THIS
I’m trying to change career paths and what I’m trying to get into is dominated by millennials. I’m an ‘old.” Well sorry, but that’s the way my best skills lie, so kindly forget about my age and let’s see what we can accomplish.
Targeted advertising isn’t the same as discriminating. Companies do only have just so much to spend. If we focus on VA or disabled sites, aren’t we excluding non-vets and those without disabilities? The same goes for “minority” sites, which exclude caucasians. Would you have a company seeking an experienced executive advertise at a college? I have a vacation rental I advertise on FB. I specifically advertise for older people in certain regions of the U.S. targeted advertising makes sense.
Yes, targeted advertising is discrimination. If a company wouldn’t be allowed to write “people over 40 need not apply” in their ad, then they should not be allowed to limit or target the ad so it isn’t seen by those people.
Define “discrimination”. It can be a good or bad term depending on context. In the context of advertising, discrimination is simply targeting *limited* resources (money & time) towards a population that has the highest probability of producing the desired outcome. This is NOT the same as discriminating in the context of traffic stops, hiring practices, etc.
Also, it’s an argument searching for a problem. We’re talking about targeted advertisements for jobs. Last I checked there were plenty of open job boards that anyone can search which don’t use age or race as a condition for producing results.
Here’s Facebook getting busted for the same practice.
Exactly! We have govt clients telling us we should target spe ific minorities in specific places –namely, places that would be a huge waste of money, not to mention discriminatory.
Please let INC know that when you click over to them to read your article, between their top banner and their bottom video ad, I can only see 9 lines of your article…the entire reason I was on the INC page in the first place!! This is frustrating! They could at least let us down size both!
I have the same problem. I hit “file,” then “print preview,” and can read it that way. Or — in the alternative — I can print it out and read it, but that’s wasteful, especially since only about half of the printed pages are the article itself; the rest are links to other articles, etc.
What this article talked about was ageism with no solution as to how to effectively deal with that problem. It all comes down to economics, most older people will have experience skills that should be given a higher pay level but labor costs have the biggest effect on the profit line unlike other costs that can be written off. So it’s cheaper to hire less skilled employees to keep labor costs down. As for that age gap between 48-70, a person needs to become independent of debts to be able to downsize expenses and still keep working in the job market.
That explains why I get no job ads. FB thinks I am a 98-year-old man. (Because that’s what I told them.)