Don't bar older job applicants
You Nuo  Updated: 2005-09-19 10:05

The management of a famous newspaper has done a terrible thing.

The paper carried a recruitment advertisement for reporters, who must be 35 or younger, to cover business and financial news.

Why the age requirement? Why must the Chinese economy, which many researchers have made life-long careers out of interpreting, be covered by people 35 or younger?

I still feel bad about the ads even though several weeks have passed. I feel bad not because I take it as a personal insult or because I have 20 years of experience reporting about economic reform and am still playing a useful role on a business reporting team.

Nor do I feel bad because I fear that kind of discrimination could someday be extended to, say, people with non-Beijing hukou, or residential registration, or to people of a particular religious background, or to overseas passport holders, or women.

For the problem in China's lacking the rule of law is usually not that a bad requirement is applied universally, but that unnecessary requirements applied on an ad hoc basis often conflict with one another in practice as well as in logic.

I have no doubt, either, that, sooner or later, there will be an equal opportunity law in the People's Republic of China to protect people from workplace discrimination. There are already lawmakers doing the ground work.

What makes me feel bad is simple: It is stupid. Attaching an extra-legal age requirement to the ads for "experienced" reporters who are capable of presenting China's business matters goes against the very purpose of the ads; it limits choices for the kind of talented people.

Even worse, this is not an isolated case. It is a social disease. Just glance at the recruitment ads in this country. Many of them, posted by employers in the State sector and private sector alike, look for people 35 or younger.

A couple of years ago, it was such a rampant practice that the requirement was attached to even senior positions such as a company's chief financial officer, direct investment manager, or logistics director.

Only recently is the age requirement becoming less frequent and less severe. For example, I saw on the Internet last week that Gome, one of China's largest chain distributors of household appliances, was looking for heads of regional operations, but they had to be no older than 45.

Before the legally defined retirement age, all adults should enjoy the same rights. From the management perspective, attempting to hire experienced young workers tends to result in poorer results, if not despair.

In olden days, age was a useful index of people's muscle power; that is, a young man could usually carry a larger sack than an old man could. But now, age really cannot be used, whether 35 or 45, to measure workers' performance so long as the key component of their jobs is creativity, not just labouring or doing what they are told.

By setting up the age barrier to applicants, employers and their human resources executives will deprive themselves of the opportunity to meet the individuals with possibly the best potential, and certainly those with the richest experience.

The practice may even scare off some people who are younger than 35. At least it would keep them wondering whether the paper is treating journalists as brain workers or as people who earn their bread through just muscle power.