Older job hunters and the creation of uselessness

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.