> In court documents, Fillelkes claimed that a recruiter told her she needed to put her dates of graduation on her resume so the company could view how old she was.
Filling out online job applications, I noticed they often require graduation dates and won't let you proceed if you leave it blank. Allows them to quickly estimate your age.
Fully-automated forms for gathering that kind of data are common outside tech and starting to show up in tech at some larger companies, especially those not seen as "startup" (either current or former).
I know someone who tried to apply to a position at a large tech company and could not complete their initial forms; this person has a master's degree from a top-25 university, is soon to have a Ph.D., has studied at the London School of Economics... but left high school early to go straight to college. Date of high-school graduation was a mandatory field in their online form, and nobody at the company could come up with a way to bypass the use of that form (and entering false information, of course, is not permitted). This person may literally have to go back and get a GED after obtaining a Ph.D. in order to be able to fill out a job application.
> Surely they must remember which year they left high school to go to college? That's graduation, early or otherwise.
Graduation is when you are certified by the school as completing graduation requirements, and usually issued a diploma attesting to that fact. Leaving without doing so, even for higher education that doesn't require a high school diploma, is not graduation.
No, it's not. It was not "your high school studies are completed early, here is a diploma and good luck in college". It was just "I'm leaving for college now, bye". Which, to a form that wants a graduation date, is equivalent to dropping out.
Every company I applied to over the last 2 years requires this. This includes all the major tech companies and MBB. I used both their own internal application process and 3rd party. Maybe it was the specific roles I was applying for, but this has been a universal experience for me.
I've seriously started to wonder if many of these people wouldn't just starve (or take to begging in the streets) if there wasn't such a profession as "recruiting" laid out for them.
Given the alarming cognitive deficits as they are routinely observed to have.
You know how users never read error messages? I suspect they never read period, they just copy and paste various things and have no real idea of what they're doing, no awareness. The recruiters just know the process of "get this JD, add our generic stuff, remove their generic stuff, post it on a job board".
Just last week we had the CFO complain that the kept being notified about something despite having clicked on the button that "makes it go away". The button was grayed out and disabled. They didn't seem worried that the were unable to perform their job duty, just that they couldn't get rid of the reminder.
I mean, we can snark about recruiters being bad at what they do and not understanding people's qualifications, but this is different. Recruiters being merely bad isn't illegal. Until the point where they ask "hey, before we proceed, can you tell us if you're a member of a protected class?"
Nitpick: You can't /be/ a member of a protected class.
Protected classes are attributes that you can't discriminate against. Being black doesn't make you in a protected class, ethnicity is a protected class.
True, that is an important clarification. I hope nobody's reading what I said as "there are certain people you are not allowed to not hire", but given the last few days on HN, of course someone's reading it that way. Oh well.
My point was that the recruiter could not make it any more obvious that they are discriminating.
One of the first things I learned about interviewing is that you just don't ask questions related to protected classes, because you could not possibly benefit from getting the answer. How could someone whose entire job is about hiring not know this?
That is one (allegedly) dumb recruiter.