Soon there will be an end to sorting people out by age
Finansforbundet supports a new law that will prohibit employers from sorting out applicants based on age - even before they have read the job applications. The law is expected to come into force this summer.
Today, unemployed applicants often submit job applications to employers via digital recruitment systems, where they are asked to provide a number of pieces of information along with the attached application. One of the pieces of information they are often forced to provide is their date of birth. The information allows employers to sort out applicants in certain age groups so that they don’t have to spend time reading the application itself. In practice, this means that an applicant may have spent a long time writing the most amazing and well-qualified application. It just never gets read.
However, as of 1 July 2022 it will be prohibited to ask. The Minister for Employment has put forward a bill prohibiting employers from asking for that information.
“There is no objective reason at all for an employer to ask for a person’s age before they have read the job application. The information can only be used to narrow down the applicant field. That’s why it’s good that we’re now closing this gap so that everyone, regardless of age, is treated equally and with respect in the application situation’, says President of FTFa and Vice-President of Finansforbundet, Steen Lund Olsen.
Minister calls the practice completely outrageous
Minister for Employment Peter Hummelgaard is completely in line with Finansforbundet and says about the bill:
‘There is a need for us to end discrimination against seniors in the labour market. At a time when companies are looking for labour, it’s completely absurd that unemployed Danish employees with lots of resources and skills experience being sorted out solely because of their age. With the bill, we are taking a small step in the work of stopping age discrimination, but we are sending a major signal to companies. This is completely outrageous’, he says and elaborates:
‘Hopefully this will mean that the application is read and the person can be considered and not risk being immediately sorted out of the applicant pool’.
The bill is an implementation of the tripartite agreement concluded by the government with the parties of the labour market last autumn and is supported by Finansforbundet. It also seems from the consultation responses to the bill that Finanssektorens Arbejdsgiverforening supports the part of the bill that prohibits negative age discrimination and ensures that the recruitment process is equal for all applicants, regardless of age.