I think there's a difference b.w "we won't hire people over X yo for this job" and "90% of our applicants for this role are younger so we're just trying to spend our recruiting dollar in the most efficient way possible to reach those folks".

Alternatively, they could simultaneously being running ads targeting employees of an older age with different messaging and content to get higher conversion.

I'm interested to know at what point effective marketing crosses the line into discriminatory practice.

Just because the environment you advertise in is inherently skewed young doesn't make it discrimination, explicitly preventing people of a certain age from seeing your ad is.

But that's not what "you" are doing. All these jobs are public. Every company in America has a jobs page that anyone of any age is free to look at.

What you are doing is not paying money to force your ad in front of people in a certain age.

>"It is also illegal for an employer to recruit new employees in a way that discriminates against them because of their race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

For example, an employer's reliance on word-of-mouth recruitment by its mostly Hispanic work force may violate the law if the result is that almost all new hires are Hispanic."

Are you serious? This is HR 101. There is no manager in the US that works for a company with an HR department (1 person is fine, that's all we have, and she's part time) could ever NOT know this.