Age Factor in Recruitment Process and Organizational Performance of Nigeria Police Force, Taraba State Command

Abstract

Lately, age consideration in employment has become a nightmare for most Nigerian graduates in their early thirties, as many employers of labour are now more than ever before, putting priority on an applicant’s age during the recruitment process. This practice has gradually turned young Nigerians into perpetual liars as they falsify their age at every job advert, to suit the employer’s requirement. Hence, it has become pertinent for human resource experts and administrators to find out if the employers’ actions are motivated by scientific proof or mere assumption that one person can perform a particular job better than another due to difference in age. To achieve this objective therefore, a survey design was adopted by utilizing primary sources of data, specifically, 386 copies of questionnaires were distributed, collected, and analyzed using a bar chart depicting the frequency of occurrence in order to compare between variables used in interpreting the responses gathered from the Nigeria Police Force, Taraba State Command. The result revealed that ageism in the employment process
operates powerfully at a subconscious level with the use of words like old or aged, in eliciting bias on different applicants on the basis of their age, without any scientifically proven benefit of such practice on organizational performance. Therefore, the study concluded that, ageism is not completely scientific and may be unprofessional for organization to fully deploy it in the recruitment process hence, employers should abolish the age factor in the recruitment process by
embracing age diversity in order to achieve timely and unprecedented results.