One man s digital native, it turns out, is another man s spring chicken.
From the front lines of corporate age-discrimination comes word, from Fortune, that more and more companies are recruiting digital natives, a loaded term that could end up looking like a big piece of red meat to hungry labor lawyers.
Why? Because the term digital native, coined in a 2001 essay by author Marc Prensky, is defined as someone born during or after the start of the digital world, meaning they grew up immersed in technologies and are native speakers of the digital language of computers and the Internet.
In contrast, Prensky noted, the older digital immigrants learn — like all immigrants, some better than others — to adapt to their environment but they always retain their accent, that is their foot in the past.
And specifically recruiting young people, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once learned first-hand, is not kosher.
Young people are just smarter, famously said on a conference stage in 2007 when he was 22. In 2013, Facebook settled a with California s Fair Employment and Housing Department for posting an employment ad that stated Class of 2007 or 2008 preferred.
As Fortune points out, companies used to list openings with new grad as a preference. But as that term showed up less and less often, a new term started making its appearance on the job-search stage.
did a simple search in Indeed.com and found dozens of listings, including from both established media giants and startups of all sizes, in which being a digital native is listed as a requirement.
And that little search turned up all kinds of examples of what a good lawyer might use to make mincemeat out of a corporate defendant:
The blogger spoke with Ingrid Fredeen, an attorney and vice president of NAVEX Global, which provides ethics and compliance programs to large organizations, wondering how a legal expert might define the term.
The term digital natives makes me cringe, she said. This is a very risky area because we re using the term that has connotations associated with it that are very age-based. It s kind of a loaded term. Posting a job ad calling for digital natives, she added, is really challenging and problematic because it implies that only young applicants need to apply.
The morale here for employers: proceed with caution:
Since the 1990s dotcom boom, many employers have openly sought to hire young, tech savvy talent, believing that was necessary to succeed in the new digital economy. At the same time, age discrimination complaints have spiraled upward, according to the (EEOC), with 15,785 claims filed in 1997 compared to 20,588 filed in 2014. Out of the last year by the EEOC for alleged discriminatory advertising, 111 of them claimed the job postings discriminated against older applicants.
The EEOC has said that using phrases like college student, recent college graduate, or young blood violate the . That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age.
Credit: SiliconBeat
