It's illegal for employers to discriminate based on age. But age bias is widely acknowledged to be a key factor in job loss and hiring practices -- something that should be painfully obvious to even a casual reader of newspapers, which routinely run articles about laid-off midlife workers.
In 2008, layoff-related age discrimination claims filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were at a record high, and they were up 29 percent compared with 2007.
Discrimination in hiring is much harder to prove -- in fact, it's nearly impossible. But older workers don't doubt that it exists. A new Civic Ventures survey of older workers found most employees reporting strong anecdotal evidence of ageism in job searches.
Survey respondents spoke of being weeded out of applicant pools. Many reported "getting the green light" during a phone interview, then watching the interviewer's face fall when the applicant arrived for an in-person meeting. "No one called until I took the dates off my resume," one job seeker said. "Then, their eyes grew wide when I met with them, making their surprise hard to miss."
"Applicants told of interviewers using telltale phrases such as seeking someone who was 'the right fit' or 'fit the culture,' and rejecting them as 'overqualified' or 'too experienced,'" reported Terry Nagel, a Civic Ventures spokesperson. Some were asked questions about their stamina and plans for retirement.
"Respondents reported that one common practice is asking applicants the date they graduated from high school," she said. "Another way of trying to elicit an applicant's age was asking if the applicant knew a person at their college who attended during a certain time frame. Some were asked their age point-blank."
Several years ago, a researcher from the National Bureau of Economic Research set out to document ageism in hiring practices by measuring the response of employers to applicants of varying ages who responded to job postings.
Read about the results of that research and other studies at RetirementRevised.com.