News Link: Targeted Help Wanted Ads Can Get You in Trouble

One of the key features of advertising on sites like Facebook is the ability to target your ads to a particular demographic. You can aim at millennials or city-dwellers or those who like dogs. The ability to get that granular in your ads can often greatly improve your click-through rate and, more importantly, your sales rate.

Unfortunately, some rather big companies have recently been busted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for targeting their Help Wanted ads at particular demographics. As reported by Xpert HR:

The EEOC said that the following companies posted job ads excluding older workers:

• Capital One;
• Enterprise Holdings;
• Edward Jones; and
• Drive Time Auto.

The agency also found that three other companies excluded women and older workers from viewing job ads:

• Nebraska Furniture Mart;
• Renewal by Andersen; and
• Sandhills Publishing Company.

Want to read more? Link to the rest at Xpert HR.

Why are these ads wrong? Well, this is a new version of the old newspaper ads that declared things like, “Looking for a strong young man to work in warehouse” or “Due to travel requirement, applicants should be unmarried” or even more offensive Want Ads that declared minorities shouldn’t even bother applying.

Instead of spelling out their apparent bigotry, the companies were making sure their Want Ads weren’t even seen by undesirable job-hunters.  They may not have meant to discriminate, but the EEOC states that is exactly what they were guilty of doing.  By their ad-targeting, they were seeking out only a particular type of job applicant (young, male, etc.) and were excluding all others who might have been interested in working for them.