
How not to advertise for a job in London - vonmoltke
http://programmingisterrible.com/post/113428268598/how-not-to-advertise-for-a-job-in-london
======
mgkimsal
Whether it's illegal or not, I sort of wish more employers would just
advertise like this anyway - just tell me you're really only interested in a
23 year old, so I can avoid wasting both our time. Theoretically, the market
will reward them with ... whatever comes of having a bunch of 23 year olds
running mission-critical aspects of your business. Might be massive success,
might be failure, but let them get on with it.

~~~
collyw
Yes the amount of people that want to interview me is high in Barcelona. The
amount of people that want to pay for my level of experience is low (and the
wages aren't especially high here). Save us both the time and tell me in
advance what you are willing to pay.

~~~
erroneousfunk
Setting experience requirements (high and low) is legal. Flat out stating an
age isn't, in both the US and the UK.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Setting a maximum experience requirement isn't legal in the US because it has
a disparate impact on older applicants.

------
lmorris84
This is either really good satire or really depressing.

It's like every HR buzzword has been shoved into a single requirements doc,
and then some bizarre ones added for good measure (it's a bonus if you like to
wear headphones apparently?)

I'm going to print this out and stick it on my wall - no matter how bad my
professional life gets, I will be reminded at least I don't work here.

~~~
tiptup
This was discussed in slack and as far as we can tell, it's legit. His
responses were to the similar effect, he did soften it saying he would give
bonus points to the applicants who meets the 'preferences'(!). That was until
his apology of course.

------
ironrabbit
Under "common behaviours of our ideal candidate" in the HR doc posted:

> 8\. Just a nice dude

It seems obvious to me that this is outright illegal gender discrimination, am
I wrong?

~~~
sebular
You're not wrong at all. Furthermore:

> 2\. Under 30 years old

Is obviously age discrimination as well. Unlike some people, I'm under no
illusions that tech is non-discriminatory, but it's still surprising and
disappointing to see it stated so plainly on a job description.

These people are idiots for leaving this document online now that they've been
caught. I don't know the specifics of UK labour laws, but in the US its mere
existence would be grounds for a lawsuit.

~~~
andyjohnson0
_" The Equality Act 2010 makes it unlawful to discriminate against employees,
job seekers and trainees because of their age."_ [1]

[1]
[http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1841](http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1841)

~~~
vasilipupkin
Wait, UK only adopted this in 2010? Sorry, I am surprised by that

~~~
andyjohnson0
The Employment Equality (Age) Regulations [1] made age discrimination illegal
beginning in 2006. Before that it was not illegal. The 2010 act, among other
things, extended protection for age discrimination to other people such as
prospective employees.

I'm British, and the fact that we only got around to this in 2006 seems to me
to be fairly shameful.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Equality_(Age)_Regul...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Equality_\(Age\)_Regulations_2006)

~~~
vasilipupkin
well, we've got plenty of shameful things in the US that we haven't gotten
around to fixing, so no worries

------
rada
If you were as confused by the "Magic Pitch" requirement as I was, here is an
explanation from the startup itself:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XqYXP1Azsk&t=1m18s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XqYXP1Azsk&t=1m18s)

Essentially, they want candidates to pitch to employers using a short video.

The idea of candidate videos has been floated about since before YouTube. I
remember discussing it with a large job board owner over 10 years ago, and
several times since, and there's always been a consensus that no real company
would touch it with a 10 foot pole, mainly because seeing the candidate means
you know their age, race and gender, all protected employment categories. It's
a complete non-starter, and the founder is being really naive for his failure
to look around and realize that if no one is doing something so painfully
obvious and easy to implement, the market has spoken.

For what it's worth, attaching a photo to your resume, while taboo in the
English speaking world, is acceptable in some European countries (Italy,
Germany, France) and even preferred in some Asian countries. Personally, I
hope this practice dies out, because of all the discrimination it inevitably
leads to. I recall a large study that showed that attractive women (surprise)
and unattractive men received significantly fewer callbacks compared to
unattractive women/attractive men and/or when their photo was added to their
otherwise identical resume.

~~~
deeviant
Is that really the reason why?

I'm pretty sure you would get somebody's age, race and gender just by reading
their resume/CV, which most job boards allow potential hiring companies to
peruse.

~~~
vidarh
The difference is how easy it will be for a candidate to make the claim that
you must have known about what protected classes they belong to when you
discarded them as a candidate.

If all you have is the CV, possibly anonymised, you can feign ignorance or
genuinely be ignorant of the candidates age, race and gender in a way that
will be absolutely impossible to pull off if you've seen them on video.

------
detaro
...aaaannd there goes the "faith in humanity"-budget for the day. There can't
be many people applying to such job offers, right?

(Also, video-pitch for a job as a backend developer? What's the logic behind
that except "let's see through how many hoops they'll jump")

~~~
testtestq
I checked it out the other day, and his whole start-up was based on this
30-second video "magic-pitch" thing, which is why they had it for their own
candidates, I guess.

~~~
detaro
So along the lines of "use our product for your application"? That would make
some resemblance of sense...

------
brohee
@xiangyu_wu deleted his twitter account and Topsy doesn't seem to have the
incriminating tweets, any other archive?

~~~
testtestq
I managed to see his tweets, where he apologised for his job-posting, by
googling for his twittername and looking it up at google cache.

~~~
brohee
Thanks, so his last tweet before nuking his account was:

"Apologies for my discriminative job advert. It was totally wrong. Going
forwards, we’re adopting a more ethical hiring procedure."

~~~
testtestq
He seem to have nuked his linkedin account and similar such accounts as well.

~~~
polynomial
This doesn't make a lot of sense, assuming Xiangyu Wu is his actual name.

Moreover while I can understand deleting a Twitter account after a Tweetstorm,
deleting your professional Linked In profile seems pointless at best, unless I
am missing something.

------
snoopy121
Yo I actually know the dude from school...feel like I owe him a bit of a
defense after his minute of twitter infamy :) I'd understand the anger if this
were, like, a Goldman Sachs-calibre company practicing age-based
discrimination, but in this case there's no _they_ , there's literally just _a
guy_ plus some coder friends of his, getting a bit excited about startup
plans.

The dude's 23 (plus or minus) himself, and decidedly not versed in HR laws - I
could imagine the words "discrimination" (...or "political correctness"...or
maybe "self-awareness") didn't even enter his mind while he typed away at his
dream candidate wish list. Sure it's hilarious, but maybe cut him some slack
re: sinister intentions. I don't think it's too pleasant waking up and getting
a hundred angry retweets for something like this.

~~~
frobozz
I agree that Hanlon's Razor should be applied here, and yes, this twitterstorm
should know its limits (see [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-
one-stupid-tw...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-
tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=0) and
[http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-
spiraled...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/21/a-dongle-joke-that-spiraled-way-
out-of-control/))

However, I'd like to take you up on two points:

> I'd understand the anger if this were, like, a Goldman Sachs-calibre company
> practicing age-based discrimination

Are you claiming that small companies should be free to discriminate against
protected characteristics with impunity, and that only large companies should
be held to account for bad behaviour? Where do you draw the line?

> decidedly not versed in HR laws

As far as I can see, Career Harbour claims to be a revolutionary recruitment
company, xiangyu_wu claims to be its founder and CEO.

In order to make those claims, one must have at least a cursory knowledge of
the law and customs pertaining to recruitment. "Know the rules well so that
you can break them effectively"

Although I can't back this up with quotes now, as the site has disappeared, I
think I read that they wanted to "disrupt" recruitment and were targeting the
milkround market, by allowing applicants to apply to all the big names with
just one form. They may not be a Big Company themselves, but they are pitching
themselves as the gateway to them. Were I to apply to PWC or KPMG or whoever
through them (with a "magicpitch" video), I wouldn't be surprised to find that
they'd not even sent it on, due to the shortage and greyness of my hair and
colour of my skin.

Also, (again, I can't back it up, because his own tweets have vanished) it
looks like some of the ire comes not just from the awful ad itself, but from
his attempt to defend it (e.g.
[https://twitter.com/digitalmaverick/status/57606722316234752...](https://twitter.com/digitalmaverick/status/576067223162347520)).
That said, in his defence, he has "had a change of heart", which may mean that
he is repentant.

Anyway, if, as he wishes his employees to be, he is a "nice dude" who
"celebrates failure" and can "accept difficult challenges as opportunity for
growth" and "deal with setbacks and failure on a continuous basis", this event
will be bread-and-butter for him.

------
markbnj
>> Enters into a state of Flow, where when the candidate is coding a long time
they are wired in and cannot easily get distracted

Haha, TBH almost every programmer I know under 30 years old is distracted
every 90 seconds by a) a tweet, b) a text, c) a notification, or d) an email.
Wait, actually that's all of us, under 30 or not.

~~~
elcct
But you have control over when you are responding to said distraction, so it
won't necessarily get you out of the zone.

~~~
vonmoltke
Depends on how you are wired. I can't not react to external stimuli, and being
in an environment with a lot of stimuli I can't control raises my stress level
pretty quickly.

~~~
bengali3
i allow myself to be impacted by this too much, but I would still say we do
have control, as we choose to allow ourselves to be exposed to the stimuli,
right? the provided examples above a-d can all be controlled by not having
your phone in front of you, and closing non-coding applications.

desk drive-bys and kitchen cake on the other hand, are much less likely for me
to resist

------
Kurtz79
[https://www.facebook.com/careerharbour](https://www.facebook.com/careerharbour)

"We introduced our first professionally designed CV template. You may purchase
it at john@careerharbour.co.uk You get a free preview."

(How do you purchase something at an e-mail address ?)

[http://www.careerharbour.co.uk/](http://www.careerharbour.co.uk/) is down.

Profile on linkedin seems to have disappeared.

Facebook has been silent since the beginning of March (after an avalanche of
posts since the beginning of the year).

Smells like a failed/failing startup...

Does someone know more ? Didn't really care much (I just wanted to know what
kind of company they were) but now I'm curious.

------
tiptup
Context: This ad first appeared in a slack channel and straightaway people
called him out and why it's wrong. Someone decided to call him out on twitter
instead. Twitterstorm.

------
jnbiche
It's not clear to me, was this ad placed _through_ Career Harbour or _by_
Career Harbour? Their site is down at the moment, but they appear to be an HR-
type of company.

Either way, it's bad news, since they either placed a blatantly discriminatory
ad themselves or they failed to warn a client that such ads are illegal in the
UK (pretty big failure for a career services company).

~~~
maxerickson
I would not be shocked if the ad is some internal document they use as an
illustration of what not to put in job ads.

Then they can have a discussion around it. This item is illegal. This item is
going to put off many candidates. This item is unclear. And so on.

edit: From other comments about people from the company nuking their online
presence, maybe it was real. Huh.

------
EliRivers
The ideal candidate displays and implements "pushing forward motions". They...
wave their hands in the air?

This is a wind up, surely!

~~~
polynomial
Fav part:

"b. come to the office every time a line of code is written."

Not sure how you would get anything done at all, if you had to run to the
office every single time you hit the return key.

------
jrgnsd
When I initially saw the ad, I thought it was satire. Didn't think it could be
real.

------
DanBC
There are a bunch of things about this document that are not legal in England.
Age, sex, and long working hours are all things theycan be done for.

------
agounaris
Once a recruiter asked me if I had 10 years of experience in a specific
technology which is there for less than 5 years...I hung up the phone...

~~~
redeleven
I had a recruiter turn me down for a job interview as I didn't have experience
with 'Marcos' on my CV. I think he meant Macros, but I was too busy laughing
to find out.

------
ratsbane
Surely that can't be for real. I saw it a few days ago and immediately thought
it was a parody... but...

------
deeviant
They forget to add:

"Well qualified candidates will have a brilliant, well-defined business plan
for a start-up idea that does not suck, which you will sign over to us in
order to have the privilege of interviewing for this junior position."

------
binxbolling
Setting aside its illegality, what strikes me here is how unintentionally
hilarious this job posting is. I'm laughing just thinking about someone
earnestly creating this, and maybe even someone else approving it for
publication.

------
vkjv
Out of curiosity, are these discrimination laws hard and fast in in the UK? At
least, in the U.S., most of these laws explicitly only affect a company above
a certain number of employees.

~~~
noir_lord
They apply whether you have 1 employee or 50,000.

~~~
mauricemir
Individual ones do collective ones consultation of redundancy and so on do
have a minimum size.

Though some elements of the Tory party and Ukip want to do away with all those
laws

------
nnd
Long Term Goals:

1\. Self-actualisation

2\. Starting their own company

3\. Change the world

