There is a common assumption that recruitment discrimination is something that happens in a decision — at sift, at interview, at offer. The statute starts earlier than that, and the wording is the reason.
The provision that catches an advert
Section 39(1)(a) of the Equality Act 2010 provides that an employer must not discriminate against a person
“in the arrangements A makes for deciding to whom to offer employment”.
Arrangements is doing the work. An advert is part of how an employer decides whom to offer employment — it determines who applies — so the wording reaches it without needing a separate advertising offence.
The protected characteristics are the nine the Act lists: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation.
And the provision that catches us
Section 55 makes it unlawful for an employment service-provider to discriminate in the provision of its service. Section 56(2) defines an employment service to include, among other things, “the provision of a service for finding employment for persons” and “the provision of a service for supplying employers with persons to do work”.
Separately, legal advice taken for this site on 6 October 2026 confirmed that a jobs board is treated as an employment agency under the Employment Agencies Act 1973, so the rules written for agencies bind us even though we take no applications and place nobody. The Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate can investigate on complaint. We set out the position in full on our terms.
The practical consequence is that an advert someone else wrote becomes our problem the moment we republish it.
The exception, and it is narrow
A requirement to have a particular protected characteristic is not automatically unlawful. Paragraph 1 of Part 1 of Schedule 9 provides an occupational requirement exception, and the employer must show that the requirement is “a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim” and that the person does not meet it.
So “female support worker” in a role providing intimate personal care can be lawful, and the same words on a sales job are not. The test is proportionality against a legitimate aim, and a preference is not an aim. This is why a screen cannot be a blacklist of words: some phrases are unlawful in one advert and lawful in another.
What we do about it
Every advert is screened for discriminatory language before it reaches the board, and anything that matches is excluded rather than flagged. The reasoning is an asymmetry: ingestion runs unattended several times a day, so a flag nobody reads protects nobody, and a false positive costs one listing out of thousands while a false negative is an unlawful advert we published.
On the most recent run, the screen read 2,754 adverts and refused 5. The 1,898 roles now listed are what remained after that and after the pay and seniority tests.
The patterns are deliberately narrow, for the reason in the section above: a loose list over thousands of adverts produces noise, and noise is how a check gets switched off. Two were removed after testing against real adverts — “craftsman” fired on “a craftsman-like approach to building software”, which describes an approach and discriminates against nobody, and a bare match on “young” fired on a description of a young team. Both would have cost genuine senior roles.
What this is not
It is not a judgement about an employer, and it is not a regulatory finding — we are not the regulator. A refusal means a phrase matched a pattern and we chose not to republish the advert. It may reflect careless drafting rather than intent, and an advert can be lawful under the occupational-requirement exception and still be refused here, because a pattern cannot assess proportionality. We publish the count and not the names for that reason.
It is also not complete. NHS Jobs supplies no advert text through its search results, so for those listings the screen sees the title alone. That is a limit of the source rather than of the check, and it is why the complaints route matters: it catches what no pattern can. If you believe a listing here is discriminatory, tell us and we will remove it while we look.
Sources
The law on this page was last read against the primary sources on 6 October 2026. The screening figures come from the most recent ingestion run. Legislation changes; if you are reading this much later, check the source.
- · Equality Act 2010, section 39 — employees and applicants
- · Section 55 — employment service-providers and section 56 — interpretation
- · Schedule 9, Part 1 — occupational requirements
- · Part 2, Chapter 1 — the protected characteristics
- · Employment Agencies Act 1973
- · Screening figures: this board’s own ingestion log