“Change doesn’t happen by following the crowd but by leading it,” says Lucy Standing, founder of Brave Starts, a career consultancy for people aged 50 and over.
More than 70% of people aged over 50 indicated ‘yes’ to the question: ‘Is recruitment broken?’ in May 2024. They aren’t wrong.
As an organisation, Brave Starts supports between 300 to 400 people a year to consider their options of ‘what to do next’. When we follow up with people, nine to 12 months after joining, a fractionally small number have found work using traditional recruitment. To be clear, there are some amazing, highly responsible and professional recruiters out there, but they represent an increasingly small fraction of the whole. There are a number of reasons why older workers are giving up on traditional recruitment.
Firstly, there is a lack of transparency. Jobs can linger on jobs boards for unspecified periods with no limits to how many times jobs can be ‘scraped’ (when a job featured on one website is copied and placed on other sites.) For the candidate, this leads to uncertainty: is a job live or not?
There is also a lack of professionalism and a largely unchecked use of AI in recruitment. Zero regulation of the recruitment industry means that there is no requirement for people to be replied to, given feedback or informed about the management of their application. AI is being utilised within the sector with little guidance or safeguards other than those self-imposed. Being ‘ghosted’, ignored or rejected (after four seconds of ‘careful consideration’) feels to many like a poor return on their time investment.
For older workers, the barriers are even greater.
Organisations have no idea how ageist they are being. I’ve asked the big jobs boards for data on how many people over 50 get called for interview vs those under 40. Reed, Indeed, LinkedIn, Hays have all indicated they don’t collect age data. Without it being collected, who is telling organisations how ageist they are being? Organisations can’t address what they can’t see.
In reality, ageism is rife. People rarely admit to being ageist but in an anonymous survey last year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released a report of more than 1,500 hiring managers across eight countries (in Europe and including the US) showing that 50% ‘might not’ or ‘definitely wouldn’t’ hire someone over the age of 55.
This can cause job seekers’ confidence to be undermined and damage their mental health. I speak to hundreds of people a year who demonstrate real passion for work, yet the continual rejection and frustration results in them feeling real anxiety, fear, anger and resentment. There is only so much rejection a person can handle.
So, what can older workers do to put themselves in the best position to get work?
• Don’t use traditional recruitment. Other than a few brilliant recruiters, the weight of evidence leads us to say that applying for jobs using jobs boards is not a good use of time.
• Create jobs before they get onto a jobs board. We help people learn to identify the organisations which have a proven business model but who aren’t of the size or scale to create a role.
• Lean into age. Age is an asset, especially to the organisations who haven’t realised it yet. Reject any calls to remove age-related information.
• Get active. Answers to purpose and meaning lie not in introspection but through action and doing.
• Become niche and focused. By trying to scattergun and appeal to everyone you appeal to no one. This applies to networking and relationship building as well as how to articulate skills, strengths and uniqueness.
The above list is not exhaustive but is a taster of what is possible. There are many other ways for people to get what they want, but in a world where things are broken, the most important step is to be brave. Change doesn’t happen by following the crowd but by leading it.
Image: Centre for Ageing Better
