An application that checks the content of recruitment announcements from a non-discriminatory perspective has been created

September 6, 2018

The Council for Preventing and Eliminating Discrimination and Ensuring Equality has created an app available on www.egalitate.md, which can check the content of job announcements in order to identify and exclude discriminatory language.

The purpose of this app is to identify discriminatory words or context in job ads that would favor or exclude certain people from the recruitment process.

Officially, the app has been launched on February 15, 2018, when more than 30 private-sector employers and job advertisers attended informational sessions.

So far, via the “Check the ad” app, about 300 job ads have been tested from non-discriminatory perspective. Out of these, 276 announcements contained potentially discriminatory words.

Age was one of the criteria most frequently referenced in 116 verified ads followed by the gender criterion identified in 104 ads.

The need to create such an app resulted from an analysis of the content of job advertisements placed on specialized sites. The result of the research revealed that:

  • Employers do not hesitate to include discriminatory criteria in their job ads (22% of monitored ads contained such criteria);
  • The sites posting job announcements do not have any guidelines, patterns, or rules on how to formulate recruitment ads and avoid discriminatory wording. Similarly, the sites analyzed do not have clear and transparent ways of sanctioning those who post discriminatory job announcements;
  • Most job ads contain discriminatory references to the gender of candidates, then to their age and physical appearance.

Discriminatory job ads contribute to the consolidation, reproduction and perpetuation of social stereotypes about gender, age, physical appearance and other features at the workplace.

It is important that the job ads focus on the tasks to be accomplished, and less on the requirements that relate to the personality of the individual:

- The definition of the job must include:

  • Title of the position;
  • The tasks to be performed;
  • Working conditions and equipment available;
  • Level of responsibility and autonomy.

- The definition of the profile of the person to be recruited must include:

  • Professional skills (studies, qualifications);
  • Language skills (in cases justified by the nature and specificity of the position).

The Council for Preventing and Eliminating Discrimination and Ensuring Equality acts on the basis of the Law on Ensuring Equality no. 121/2012 which prohibits discrimination in the workplace and qualifies as discriminatory the employer's actions of publishing job announcements that indicate the conditions and criteria that exclude or favor certain persons.

This app has been developed by the Council for Preventing and Eliminating Discrimination and Ensuring Equality in partnership with the Institute for Penal Reforms and with the support of the Programme for Financing Human Rights Initiatives/Projects for Change. This programme is carried out with the participation of the Institute for Penal Reforms within the "Strengthening the technical capacities of national institutions for the promotion and protection of human rights" Project financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and implemented by the United Nations Development Programme.