On Hiring “40-Somethings”

A LinkedIn post on Sunday night by a business owner in Belgium created a firestorm of reaction by Monday morning. In her post Why I hesitate to hire forty-somethings, Inge Geerdens put her point across on this delicate subject. As I read it, I could actually see her post being interpreted in one of two ways, either being discriminatory and almost biased, yet also being cautious on how she invests her salary dollars. Or, perhaps, a combination of both.

You read it, and see what you think Geerdens was trying to say. The next day, after she realized the reaction she created, she posted again to explain herself: “I hire on ability, and nothing else.” From the reactions to the more recent post, it’s not clear to me that she was successful in making her point any clearer to them.

With today’s social media technologies, yet another example of how people really must be extra careful of how they express their points of view.

Advertisement

What are your thoughts?

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: