How Apple explicitly discriminates by age in hiring ads
This is not necessarily to pick on Apple, but it’s just one of the companies whose products and business I’m interested in. And this post is to highlight how Apple discriminates by age when hiring. The purpose of this post is to illustrate how ethical standards are flexible across regions and if someone is telling you that they’re an ethical business, that has in most cases extra qualifiers to it like geography that the statement applies to and what criteria for “ethical” are being used.
In the US, explicitly discriminating by age is not really that common, is it? Short of saying “illegal”. But apparently it’s perfectly fine in other regions.
Here’s a screenshot from Apple’s US retail hiring page.
Note the part at the bottom that says…
We are committed to diversity. Apple is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer.
And here’s a job ad for an Apple retail consultant in Moscow.
You may not understand this, but let me translate. There’s one bullet there that says…
представительная внешность, возраст от 18 до 30 лет
This translates to “good looks, age between 18 and 30”.
I’m not sure about the legality or ethics of that first “good looks” part, but the explicit age qualifier is illegal in many countries. It appears to be fine in Russian Federation. To me personally, this is telling about both the business and hiring culture in Russian Federation and the flexibility of big companies to bend after it for business purposes. In practice, legal and ethical standards are relative, not absolute, and depend on the local (business) culture.
In Estonia, age qualifiers in hiring ads like this were commons about ten years ago. They were ruled to be both immoral and illegal and have disappeared since.
UPDATE: ten hours after posting this, the Russian ad is gone. Don’t know if it’s connected to this post or not. I just want to underline that I don’t think Apple is in any way a special case, surely you could find other companies doing the same thing, it was just one of the first companies that I could think of.
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Hi Jaanus,
It’s the Russian side of the business where they can (maybe) do that.. not in US. One of the things that made me always really furious in Italy is that nearly every job has limits on which age group (22 to 24, under 22, under 27 etc) and even sex can apply for it. Maybe that can have some visual appeal for a job in a 5 star hotel receptionist, but none of the jobs that I’ve ever looked at are that. Why would they need an engineer with degree and 5 years of job experience to have max 27 years? I find absolutely no business reasons for those age or sex limits, and feel like people should start to rebel - apply for those jobs, and then sue for discrimination. However, if I saw that on any of Apple Italy’s jobs as a requirement, I would act for sure…
In the U.S. we have more sophisticated ways to do the same thing. “Recent College or High School Graduate” “must have attended Medical School within the last 10 years”. I guess doctors are only good for 10 years? A lot of subtle ways to ignore the law. Justifications: “Too much experience”, “over-qualified”, “to hard to retrain”, “need someone with more apparent energy”, “we need a more recent knowledge base for this position”, “Ah; she’s a bit rusty, not up to date” and I’m sure you can add more if you’ve heard them. I haven’t been a victim yet but I guess it will come. I’ve heard enough of “yeah but will she fit in?” and “we need a cleaner spiffy look in marketing” Or “He looks good for the job; young energetic — ah; well; young is not a factor but you know what I mean?”
Mike