to be appalled at this and to think about whether I want to work there in the long term

[hopipolla]

I've just got a new job and we are recruiting for a new member of staff and I'd collated and printed out all the applicants CVs and Cover Letters before giving them to the person who is in charge of the recruitment process. He immediately picked up half of them and put them in the bin before joking with another colleague that "unlucky people don't get hired", he then proceeded to put one in the shredder which he had had delivered that morning as he needed to "test it" apparently before laughing with the colleague again.

I'm about the whole episode but DP thinks that this sort of thing will be fairly common practice at the current time with some many people jobhunting and that I'm overreacting due to my brother who is graduating in June and so is sending a lot of CVs/applications out.

Discrimination means picking a common characteristic of the applicants to use to reject them. Unless you argue for "luck" the premise of the old joke, he can't know there is a common characteristic without reading them in the first place! Either way, luck is not a protected characteristic. He could quite easily choose to chuck out all applicants with a k in their name, and unless someone could prove indirect discrimination on the grounds of race, he'd be fine to do that. A wanker, but not illegal.

NanettaStocker - interesting post which nobody else seems to have picked up on. Nice one OP.........nice one. And welcome to Mumsnet by the way!

I had a boss who used to do the same with application forms. He was an almighty dick,tho. Before I got married and had ds he told me we wouldn't be giving a contract to an excellent temporary worker because she was a breeder :-/ she already had 2 small children.I started job hunting the same day when I heard that! He also had a tendency to employ people he fancied despite their lack of suitability for the job. I wish I could say that karma a

Not discriminatory to bin half the cvs as not based on their content. Ethical? Well, there's ethical and practical - if there are too many to review, you have to cut them down somehow, but he sounds a prat of the highest order, revelling in this. I do quite a bit of recruitment and have a lot of cvs to read. There are some things that make me put them on the "no" pile. Main ones are pompous wording and odd or non sequitur sentence construction ("having climbed Kilimanjaro in my gap year, I felt I should then seek experiences of other kinds") and anyone who says that they "relish" the thought of working with us. Loathe that word in that context, so false.

I did a temp job years ago and was asked to sort through the job applications, I hadn't got a clue what I was doing, it is really sad to think of peoples' hard work just being deleted by a temp .

Oops! Don't know what happened there. I wish I could say that karma caught up with him but he has been promoted a lot and travels the world with his new job and likes to see himself as a fair employer :-S

It's nasty but happens. When I went on maternity leave I had to do the shortlist for my cover. We had over 200 applicants and my boss literally took the first half forme do and shredded the rest. Rotten for those people I did feel bad.

Oh dearie, I've heard the joke before and assumed the ops boss has too

I assumed that the OP's boss had also heard this been said before and was mimicking tbh.

Either way, he's still a prick, even if he's a made up one.

You two may very well be right and I might be wrong. This is MN and anything is possible - even the impossible!!

years ago (decades even) in a similar economic climate, i had to sift through applications and put the best ones through to my boss. we had 'rules', for example, anyone with silly handwriting (childlike, circles where there should be dots etc) their application didn't go through.

This has just reminded me of a 'clever' strategy I applied for a short time whilst job hunting as a graduate: I printed my CV on novelty cloud paper in the hope that it would get me noticed Real clouds though, not cartoon ones (grasping for justification!)

It didn't work.

I was told to keep my cv to two sides of a4. I actually considered laminating it! Well I'd like it - wipe clean and non bendable :)

ineed. You wouldn't have got on my list with your novelty paper, sorry.

I had one candidate who went a bit far with the instructions about using black ink only. Their pen obviously ran out part way through the cv. Instead of starting again, they wrote a long diatribe about how they were a real rebel and iconoclast by not using a blue pen or a black pen or whatever it was. Sadly for them, as soon as I read that, their cv went in the bin!

I once had an application from a woman but I suspect her dh wrote it for her. Reasons for wanting the job. "For a steady 9-5 job in order to spend more time with my husband"

I know someone who works at HMRC and she does that with forms from rich people who are owed a rebate because she hates them. Not a friend I hasten to add and have often thought about reporting it. She is in Scotland.

What an abominable thing to do - that man is not fit to be in charge of hiring. not only is it extremely offensive and unfair on the applicants but it is doing his company a huge disservice as well. He should be reported but I doubt you'd want to be the one to do it, having just joined.

Although if the jobs in question are minimum wage conveyer-belt fodder that require no specific skills or qualifications then I can imagine it gets pretty wearing ploughing through six hundred identical applications for 5 posts.

He is still in the wrong though.

fellatio, are you my doha friend with a namechange?

What a DICK.
I recently had nearly 300 applications for 10 jobs. I read every single one. I even replied, personally, to every single one. There is no excuse for such poor behaviour

Mushroom, your employer may argue your time would have been better spent on oter tasks

What a waste of time, Mushroom. I'm surprised your employer was happy for you to do that. Surely it cut into time you should have been spending doing your actual job? Unless your job is recruitment, in which case, okay.

Je binned the forms without reading them? O would have sent his line manager an anonymous note after the recruitment process is over detailing what you have put in your post. As he did it in open view of the office anybody could have typed the note & left it on the managers desk. Hopefully his performance will ben monitored.

I review applicants but its easy to cull them. It's usually a part time role
My criteria:
Have they applied for my job -often forget to change details
If they have to travel too far -anything west of the city
I do discard recent graduates -sorry but you will leave once your dream job comes up.
Too young -it's a position of responsibility and maturity counts -could be age discrimination on this!!

I am yes.

That's definitely discrimination newbie. Better hope no one finds out. You aren't allowed to judge by age unless age is relevant to the position, for which 'responsibility and maturity' may or may not qualify.

It actually doesn't take long. As Newbie says, it's easy to cull. In my line of work grammar and spelling is important so applications are discarded quite quickly. It doesn't take long to email the candidate with a line to say why.