Older job hunters and the creation of uselessness

While the notion of “usefulness” might seem hopelessly utilitarian, the trials of older Australians looking for work is a story of age prejudice and deception at a time when the nation needs their brains most.

I run a small professional writing and marketing business. I write advertisements, resumes and conduct basic market research. I am vitally interested in the nexus between government educational policy and people getting jobs.

I followed the fortunes of three of my clients over a nine-month period. Karl, 54, had been retrenched from the automotive industry. He wanted to get a job in an office doing data entry. Peter, 40, was a house husband who, after three years looking after the kids, wanted to get back in to marketing. Michaela, 48 was a former academic who simply wanted a job. All three had their resumes written by me.

Currently the Australian unemployment average is 4.9 per cent. According to the Review of Higher Education (DEEWR, 2008) “The ageing of the population will pose particular problems for workforce participation and productivity. At an industry level, skills shortages will be exacerbated over the next decade as large numbers of experienced workers retire. For the overall economy, as the population ages, there is a risk that the rate of participation in the workforce will fall, reducing output and productivity.”

Source: ABS Census 2006 data
Workforce participation by higher level of qualification by age

I picked Karl, Peter and Michaela because as former clients they had consistently gotten “thanks but no thanks letters” after job interviews. I told them that persistence pays off. But after nine months and a stream of rejection letters to all three people, I stopped using glib clichés and started investigating.

The problem was that Peter and Michaela were over qualified as they both had post graduate qualifications and all three were “over age” for 90 per cent of the jobs that were available.

These were three normal people. Karl had just finished a computer course specialising in desktop publishing at his local TAFE. All were erudite and presented well.

Ageist attitudes to employment are not new but I suggest that as the boomer cohort ages, ageist attitudes are becoming more entrenched - and I don’t know why.

The American social theorist Richard Sennett says in The Culture of the New Capitalism, “As experience increases, it loses value … Automation is indifferent to experience. Market forces continue to make it cheaper to buy skills fresh rather than to pay for retraining. These conditions combined give the spectre of uselessness solid substance in the lives of many people today.”

If employers believe that “experience loses its value”, the nation has a major cognitive hurdle to jump. In the normal course of events, experience should be valued because older workers can draw from a deep well of life knowledge. They are the providers of life long learning before the term became fashionable.

According to a study published in the International Journal of Organisational Behaviour called Barriers to Mature Aged Re-Employment: Perceptions About Desirable Work-Related Attributes Held by Job-Seeks and Employers (Ranzijn, Carson & Winefield) it was found that:

Employers valued the experience of their own older employees, but regarded older workers in general as inflexible, fussy, and unwilling to adapt to new technology and changing work conditions. There was little or no awareness that one of the consequences of population ageing will be a shrinking future workforce as older employees retire with fewer younger people to replace them, and consequently little or no evidence of long-term planning to ensure a viable pool of employees.

Even so, their study was inconclusive about mature age employment discrimination, finding that one possibility was the perception of discrimination in the mind of the job seeker. The thinking is roughly like this: “I am 55. I have looked for work. I am still unemployed. It is not the employers. It is me.” That’s a recipe to kill confidence.

What has not been reported is the high number of people who are looking for second jobs, as the cost of mortgage repayments and petrol rise, and the interest on the credit card debt starts compounding. I know that through my business and talking to parents in public schools, working two jobs is far from uncommon.

More people looking for jobs make it harder on older age cohorts to get a job. The people who are working two jobs are simply registered by the ABS as “employed”.

I discovered that data on raw jobs available - which are reported as hard facts - count the number of appearances that a job appears online per day. So for example, Seek will run a job three or four times on its scroll per day. It’s still the same job but it’s counted four times. Employers also rewrite the wording of the same job and list it again. That’s considered a new job listing too.

So while it’s easy to measure the number of job ads appearing in a newspaper, counting the gross number of “displays” on an online agency such as Seek gives a wildly distorted result.

About 10 per cent of “hires” come from word of mouth. While recruiters seem to endlessly “bang on” about the value of networking, there is certainly a positive association to getting hired on the basis that someone recommends you. Mates employ mates. Unfortunately networking circles are closed to the older unemployed. You need to be employed to be a networker and to be granted admittance to their events.

Recruitment agencies are quite good places to start for older job hunters. They offer initial personalised service and some of my clients have got long term and short term work through agencies. Unfortunately the frequency of personal attention can diminish quickly. While they want to have clients on their books, if they cannot see you as an easy “fit” then you quickly fall off the radar.

And this is where Karl, Peter and Michaela hit problems. They were told that there were other candidates who were better organisational “fits”. The notion of “fit” is curious. The image of nice round pegs fitting in to round holes is overwhelming.

While one can see that, for example, a diesel mechanic from the Pilbara might not be the best person to run a childcare centre in South Yarra, the notion of “fit” can be taken too far.

Much of the premise of the recruitment interviews and tests concerns organisational “fit”. It presupposes that there is someone out there (they are always out there rather than in society) who is perfect. In reality, no such person exists. The term “organisational fit” for Karl, Peter and Michaela meant that “you’re too old”. Of course a recruitment company or employer will say that because discrimination on the basis of age is against the law.

“I started ringing recruitment agencies up and asking why I was knocked back. They kept saying it was a very competitive tendering process, with a lot of high standard applications. I knew one of the people employed at a TAFE and he had less experience and less qualifications than me. He was 33. No sour grapes but go figure,” Michaela said.

In The Australian Careers Section recently reporter Karalyn Brown talked to Steve Begg, the General Manager of Operations of executive recruiters Tanner Menzies and to Bob Oliver, director of Olivier Recruitment Group.

Neither man could adequately explain what “cultural fit” was. Brown asks “If cultural fit can be critical to an employee’s long-term career satisfaction, how do candidates determine this?”

“Both Begg and Olivier find this a hard question to answer. Olivier suggests people need to recognise that a company’s marketing brand is different from its employment brand.”

Quite right. Yet the real point is that these men can’t explain what cultural fit is. That’s because it’s HR oral mush. “Fit” is the kind of pseudo social science term made up by HR gurus. The real politic of “fit” in HR is to use it as a roadblock against older Australians getting back in to the workforce.

So not only are the availability of jobs over reported but also HR companies and employers use the term “fit” to weed out older candidates.

My argument about employment age prejudice is directly contradicted by a 2006 Treasury report called “Older men bounce back: the re-emergence of older male workers”.

Fulltime and part time participation for males 55-64 years

Their graph shows that more older males are being unemployed. The authors of the report, Steven Kennedy and Alicia Da Costa, admit that the article is not an official Treasury document (except it has the Treasury logo on the webpage). They have inadvertently hit the nail on the head when they say that the key economic incentive for people to supply labour is the wage they receive in return.

Almost all of my older clients said money was the key motivator for returning to work -- not post materialist values such as work is a good in itself - although that may have been a secondary factor.

What we are seeing is a gross increase of older men returning to the workforce for a variety of reasons (insufficient pensions or superannuation), but this is nowhere near the amount needed to soak up supply. The boomer generation looks, graphically speaking, like a “pig in a python” and while some older Australians are being employed - in relation to younger cohorts - the real effect is that the majority of older people who wish to work fulltime are being turned away.

After six months of job hunting Karl got a temporary job as a night cleaner. There was no holiday pay or any of the trimmings but he says he was lucky to get a job.

“I used a lot of my money doing courses and buying news clothes and bus tickets. It’s bloody expensive looking for a job,” Karl says.

Karl also dyed the grey out of his hair and went to a solarium to try and look younger.

Michaela’s PhD almost doomed her to a life on the dole. I recast her CV as a senior administration officer and her referees agreed to the fabrication. She had indeed been a senior administrator at university but her research field of semiotics probably wouldn’t be much use to in her new job as a call centre supervisor.

Peter is still looking for a job. In part his problem is living in Adelaide, where there is keen competition for white-collar communication and business jobs.

“It has been a harrowing process (looking for a job). It has effected my belief in myself. I’ve been knocked back so many times. I’m lucky that I have a loving and supporting partner otherwise I’d be stuffed. I don’t brag. Maybe that’s it, but I figure the balance of probabilities has to turn in my favour soon,” Peter says.

This is no place to examine life cycle studies that show that hiring older staff brings with it maturity and stability way beyond any functional measure of “organisational fit”.

One has to wonder about the existence of age prejudice in the 21st century, when economies so badly need experienced and stable workers. It’s a hangover from the 19th century that refuses to go away and, unless fixed, will impede any government productivity and employment initiatives for the next 30 years.