ELearning Platform for Age-Diverse Recruitment
Vienna (AT), May 2009 - Due to the youth-oriented hiring policies of enterprises, mature jobseekers are frequently being excluded from the recruitment process and stereotyped as being "too old" to do certain jobs. Mature@eu is an eLearning platform that aims to enable employers or personnel recruiters to introduce age-diverse recruitment policies and practice.
Two major issues support the need for a re-orientation of the hiring policies currently in place:
- Due to the demographic shift, the skilled labour supply is constantly declining. In the future, the number of young skilled employees will continue to dwindle, and the participation of older workers will become (and already is) essential.
- The EU Equal Treatment Directive 2000 makes it unlawful to discriminate against older applicants because of their age.
The ICT sector is an area where this problem is particularly acute. Organisations can now begin to examine and redesign their own recruitment and selection policies and practices to avoid an age bias.
Mature@eu and Silver, European Leonardo da Vinci projects that address the issue of the ageing workforce in a practical way, will be presented at a one-day conference at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, on 11 June 2009.
The conference is titled Performance et âge: comment bénéficier de l'expérience des seniors (Performance and age: how to benefit from the experience of mature workers) and is aimed at HR professionals, managers, and all those concerned with mature workers. Keynote speakers include HRDs and CEOs from Von Roll, Postfinance, and CFF, as well as academic experts and mature workers themselves. The conference language is French.
