January 07, 2011
Unqualified youngsters and ex-offenders are just a few of the disadvantaged groups being overlooked by employers, new research has found.
According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), three quarters of employers haven't hired from disadvantaged groups, including older workers, in the last three years.
The research also found that one third of employers actively exclude some disadvantaged groups from their recruitment process.
However, despite the negative figures, the prevalence of discrimination was an improvement on a previous CIPD survey in 2005, which found that 62% of companies did not consider applications from one or more of the disadvantaged groups.
Ex-offenders were the most likely to have their applications turned down, with nearly one fifth (19%) of employers excluding applications from this group. Applications from young people aged 18 and under with few or no qualifications were not considered by 16% of companies, and employers considered this group to be the worst performing.
"Employer reluctance to recruit from groups who have faced barriers to employment shows that the Government still faces a huge challenge in getting more economically inactive benefit claimants - especially those with a criminal record - off welfare and into work," Gerwyn Davies, CIPD Public Policy Adviser, said.
He added that the extent of exclusion was not always justified by the potential of the target group and employers with experience employing ex-offenders consider them to be as productive as other workers and, in some cases, more loyal than the rest of the workforce.
