Applying for jobs asking for full work history

[Bluenoodles]

As above. I’m a 51 year old female looking for part time care / support work. Is it common, or even legal to ask for a full work history going back to secondary school like I am being asked.
It just seems a way of determining your age when they obviously can’t directly ask it.
I understand if you’re working with vulnerable groups there’s a need to get peoples backgrounds, but my secondary school doesn’t exists anymore, neither do some of the companies I worked for either. I doubt they’d keep HR records going back 20/ 30 odd years anyway.
In one interview I had already supplied my work history going back 25 years, because I’d worked for the same company for 20 of them, only to be put on the spot and asked to supply all work history going back to school during the interview, unsurprisingly I didn’t get that job.
I’ve got another interview and they’ve sent over a job application, again asking me to complete a full work history going back to school years, as far as I am aware it’s a different company, just wondering if this is some crank hr department being over zealous, or if this is a requirement now if you’re working with the vulnerable people.

If you’re in your 50s or 60s, with a degree and professional qualifications and decades of experience, I’d be querying why you’d need to include exam results from when you were 15 or 16 at all!
I have been known to refer to GCSEs rather than O levels for reasons of discretion. Age discrimination is a very real thing.

It is over the top and lacking nuance.

It also excludes good experienced people from jobs they have much to offer to.

My relative retired early from an SLT role in a specialist SEN school intending to do some part time supply teaching so she could wind down a bit and spend more time with her grandchildren.

She ended up giving up entirely due to these requirements. She had over 40 years of work history to put together and they needed her work placements from her training and certificates to show her qualifications.

Her teacher training college no longer existed, neither did some of the exam boards, or several of the schools she has worked at. She struggled to remember whether she'd worked somewhere in 1973 or 1975 or whatever and there was no discretion.

With automated/online application processes being very common now, you're just going to get the application automatically rejected if you don't fill the boxes on the application. If it's been programmed to automatically reject any applicant who hasn't put, say, a GCSE/GCSE Maths qualification on the form, you're going to be immediately rejected the money you hit "submit". The automated system isn't going to "read" the rest of your application to notice that you've got a First degree in Maths. Obviously, you'd hope that whoever has programmed the application system has tailored it properly to the actual job specification/requirements, so that such a stupid scenario wouldn't happen, but it's all done to the experience/ability of whoever is setting the parameters for that particular job application. Applications and CVs aren't commonly read by humans anymore at the early stages, so it's ALL about filling the boxes and hoping to satisfy the parameters placed upon each box.

I had this recently, wanted to know a gap of 6 months from 23 years ago. I told them but it did seem pointless telling them of a part time job, in a place that no longer exists as was pulled down to build flats, for an owner who's been dead for around 15 years.

This is worrying me! I was made redundant last month and I’m taking 3-6 months off before looking for work. It sounds as though that could be a problem when I start looking for a job!

I had this back in 2012 when I tried domiciliary care for a year. At that point I was asked to go all the way back to my school leaving year of 1998. No idea what they did with all that info, whether it was checked or just filed as backside covering should it come to it.

Turns out the care firm didn’t have the best of reputations and this plus being asked to pay the cost of the CRB (today DBS) should have been red flags but I didn’t know any better then. Although to be fair they are still in biz and I’ve known of other smaller companies be closed down by the CQC for ‘insufficient reference checking of new employees’.

I left a long term full-time job and ended up zero hours travelling miles away for work as of course it was dropped on me during the first week of three unpaid training/induction that all local clients were covered.
In theory I should have shopped around but again with my first care job that would never have occurred either.

You may also want to consider joining a union when it comes to direct caring.