September 29, 2008
Guru has uncovered the last bastion of workplace discrimination - again. This time, it's birthday discrimination.
Yep, it seems that employers have been choosing job candidates based on the day of the year they were born on.
The telescope wielders behind free horoscopes website www.scopemyfuture.com say they regularly get contacted by employers about the work-related personality traits traditionally linked to each star sign.
So they did what all good publicity-hungry business people do - they ran a survey. And lo and behold, one in five of the employers they asked admitted to having taken a candidate's star sign into consideration during a recruitment process. Whether it was mainly Taureans or Leos that took star signs into account was undisclosed.
Judi Vitali, astrologist at that fount of all workplace wisdom Marie Claire magazine, and the 'expert' behind www.scopemyfuture.com, said: "It's impossible to find out a great deal about a person from a 30 minute interview, so employers are keen to do everything they can to get a rounded view of an applicant before hiring them, which is why they have been asking for this information.
"It's not uncommon for employers to give job candidates aptitude or psychometric tests to get an idea of their approach to their work and an insight into their personality. Checking up on their star sign can also provide an indicator of a person's personality and attitude to work."
Guru has his own way of checking a job candidate's personality and attitude to work - he asks them whether they read Marie Claire or www.scopemyfuture.com and if they do then their application goes in the bin.
