Older job hunters and the creation of uselessness

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.