Although the full impact of the new UK age discrimination legislation is unclear, there is one obvious – and feasible – requirement: defensible record-keeping and reporting. If and when the time arrives to prove compliance, navigating a messy paper trail will expose more risk and vulnerability.

In that light, the results of our new research on the careers sites of the FTSE 100 companies, Careers Site Recruiting in the FTSE 100 Companies: A Missed Opportunity, are all the more significant.

Nearly half of the FTSE 100 companies have no apparent recruitment management technology – the core of any record-keeping and reporting system. They have corporate websites, corporate careers sites, post job positions online…and yet they receive applications via emailed CVs.

Managing a recruitment process with candidate data stored on email CVs is not far afield from file cabinets of paper CVs. In fact, it may be worse. It is so much easier for candidates to submit CVs by email, rather than postal mail. This leads to increased volume.

Lacking end-to-end recruitment technology, these companies miss out on automated support for online pre-screening, skills-based selection, and proactive recruitment from the company’s own talent pool. We wonder how companies which have no technology in place to manage their recruitment processes will demonstrate their compliance to the recruitment methods inherent in the new legislation.