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Hiring According to the Stars

By Miss Cellania in Odd News on Feb 5, 2009 at 11:20 am


Remember the story of how some Japanese firms base their hiring on a person’s blood type? An insurance company based in Salzburg, Austria is hiring people based on their astrological sign! Twenty part-time jobs were offered to those born under the signs of Capricorn, Taurus, Aquarius, Aries and Leo. Anti-discrimination groups protested, and government authorities are looking into the matter.

The company is, however, sticking to its guns and a spokesman explained that the move was based on statistical research rather than superstition.

‘A statistical study indicated that almost all of our best employees across Austria have one of the five star signs.

‘We only decided to continue with that system and hire the best workers,’ the spokesman said.

An investigation by Austrian authorities showed that there was nothing illegal in choosing the employees according to their star signs, as there was no discrimination according to existing laws about gender, age, racial and other equality.

Link -Thanks, Bill!

(image credit: Flickr user Atelier Teee)


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COMMENT
  1. Gauldar
    Feb 5th, 2009 at 11:29 am

    Taurus huh? I hope they know there are some downsides with us. Sure, we hold loyalty very high and like to stay in good standing with coworkers, but damn are we lazy & stubborn! There shouldn't be a problem with discrimination groups since this is the process of hiring, and firing... and people have been turned down from jobs for even dumber reasons. At least they are being straight forward off the start that they are hiring people in an eccentric way.

  2. Zecc
    Feb 5th, 2009 at 12:19 pm

    The wonderful side-effect is they are also skewing future statistic even more towards people with these signs.

  3. Gauldar
    Feb 5th, 2009 at 12:30 pm

    Meh, I wouldn't be concerned. This is an insurance company, they thrive on statistics. They don’t look at rationality; they just look at the numbers.

  4. Foosnark
    Feb 5th, 2009 at 1:05 pm

    Technically this is age discrimination, if you consider age in months...

  5. Morris
    Feb 5th, 2009 at 2:35 pm

    This kind of makes it easy to discrimate on age, gender, race or religion. All you have to do is decide who you don't want and pick something else.

    Hmmm. If you don't want to hire a woman, tell her she wasn't chosen becaues she is a scorpio. But why stop their why say it is because you don't hire red-heads, or people from Missouri, or people who watch a particular TV show, or maybe you don't like their favirote ball team?

    If you can discriminate for a zodiac sign, you can pretty much discriminate for anything.

  6. Shrike
    Feb 5th, 2009 at 10:54 pm

    In the 42 states in the US that support at-will employment, you can be terminated for ANY cause at all, so long as it's not discrimination that's protected under law. Even then, good luck proving it. You can literally be fired for any reason whatsoever. I don't know what the laws are in Europe, though.

  7. Christophe
    Feb 5th, 2009 at 11:25 pm

    How can people still believe in the stars? this was created more than 2000 years ago, and since the constellation "moved", at least they should update their calendar.
    I say : sue!

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