Auto Amazon Links: No products found. Blocked by captcha.
A tribunal has rejected a claim of racial discrimination made against Liverpool Football Club by job applicant Asad Farooq. Farooq had applied for the first team operations officer role but was not shortlisted for interview. He subsequently claimed that his British Asian heritage led the club to take an “unconscious bias” against his application. However, Liverpool countered by saying that the application was refused because of Farooq’s lack of experience.
During the tribunal, it was revealed that the club had received 487 applications for the position; 444 were considered before the list was reduced further for shortlisting. The hiring manager, head of first team operations Louise Dobson, initially rejected Farooq’s application due to his salary demands, but the process was re-opened again when the first candidate selected turned the job down. On the second “sift” through the applications, Farooq was once again turned down because of his lack of experience in operational first team roles.
Delivering a majority ruling at Liverpool Civil and Family Court, employment judge Nicola Benson said: “The majority view is that the evidence is clear. At the stage she carried out the shortlisting again, with the intent to reduce the number of 444 applications to a more manageable number, there are no facts or inferences from which we could conclude it had anything to do with the claimant’s race.” One of the two magistrates sitting with Judge Benson, however, disagreed and believed Dobson should have advanced Farooq to the interview stage.
Dobson indicated that the club wanted someone who was dealing with players, coaching staff, and the rest of the team on a day-to-day level, rather than someone who was dealing with catering. During the three-day hearing, Farooq said he first suspected he had been discriminated against when he saw a post on the LinkedIn website in May 2023. The post, from a temporary staffer called Anna Garnett with limited experience, wrongly suggested that she had been appointed to the first team operations officer role
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More
Auto Amazon Links: No products found. Blocked by captcha.