Enough with ageism!
Over the last year or so, I have seen ageism play out repeatedly in the TA profession against their TA peers. You’ve probably seen it too—hundreds of experienced TA pros knocked out of processes for lame excuses that barely shield the truth.
It makes me fume because your job is to hire the best people for the company, those that will significantly and positively impact the bottom line. Your job is to set your personal biases aside and hire the people that will help the company succeed. Ruling people out on age alone or for some of the myths I blast below, is not doing right by your company.
I know what it’s like to be edging ever closer to my mid-50s and still learning, growing, trying different things, and evolving. I am nowhere near done. I plan to live past 100; I have dreams. I feel 30 and if you have the honour of growing old, you’ll discover this feeling too.
Tackling, ageism isn’t my area of expertise. However, when Suzanne Lucas dropped this doozy of an article on me, ‘Men more likely to be ageist than women, study finds’ I decided to do more than curse, I decided to write a post—which blew up—and now I am following it up here because I learned a few things.
In case you missed my post, I wrote:
“24% of people think it does not make business sense to employ someone over 50 because they will be a slow worker who will not be able to adapt.” Not able to adapt? FFS 🤦♀️ Just ask Gen-X and Boomers about adapting to tapes, records, CDs, and digital, for starters. Let alone everything else they’ve adapted to. 🫠🤬
“22% also thought it was a waste of resources to give in-job training to someone over 50 because they did not think older workers were likely to stay in their role for long.” 🤣 from the generations who change jobs every few years! 🤦♀️
Wake up UK people!!
The state pension currently kicks in at 66 and is expected to increase to 67 between 2026 and 2028 for people born after April 1960, and is expected to increase to 68 between 2044 and 2046 for people born after April 1977.
Now go check out the UK’s low birth rates.
Stop being ageist – you need these workers!
Late Career Ageism
On page 138 of my latest book, Reboot Hiring, I address the cost of ageism. Defining it as ‘the unfair treatment of people because of their age’, I share examples found easily online and resources to address both late-career ageism, impacting the over 45s, and experience-ism, impacting those vying for entry-level roles.
Today, I am focusing on those perceived as “old” and I don’t wish to pit generations against each other. But let’s blast some myths!
“They won’t adapt!”
Xennials, Gen-X and Boomers have adapted to more technological changes in their lifetimes than the ones following ever will so believing they won’t adapt is nuts. They will push back if the decision seems foolish and doesn’t benefit the company, because they’ve been around the block a few times but having perspective is different to being unwilling to change.
As Simon Halkyard added to my post.
“They’re expensive!”
As with every other profession, experience comes with a price tag. But as Ragi Kuttikate expresses so well, ‘Ageism isn’t just unfair, it’s bad business!’
Imagine every possible scenario, both good and bad, that a late-career recruiter will have experienced from hiring managers and candidates. They’ll be calm facing it again, as their muscle memory engages and they smoothly negotiate a positive outcome for all parties.
Poor hiring manager behaviour? Solved. Managers creating costly and slow hiring processes? Resolved. Feedback a drag to get? Fixed. Candidates dropping out of the process? Sorted. And on and on and on… they know every trick in the book to create efficiencies and improve productivity, because the problems in hiring are always human-made, and they’ve been recruiting since before devices.
So, sure they may cost an extra £20, £30 or even £40k per annum but they’ll save the company hundreds of thousands of pounds in wasted time and failed hiring.
“They’ll show me up!”
If somebody gets their kicks out of undermining your leadership and highlighting your flaws to others, they’ll do that at any age. That comes from their insecurity not because their boss or colleagues are younger than them. The vast majority of people become more comfortable in their skin as they get older. Usually, they learn from their mistakes and experiences and gain perspective and wisdom.
However, if you fear hiring someone better or more experienced than you, and cannot see the brilliant opportunity you will have to learn from them, then it is you who needs to work on their self-worth. Because vulnerability is a strength.
Being vulnerable can help us to better know ourselves, while cultivating and strengthening our relationships with others. It can also help us better understand our opportunities for growth, enhance our self-awareness, and flex our emotional intelligence muscles. – Nate Battle, Headspace.
“They don’t fit the culture”
What because they may not go drinking with you after work? As with biases, I know little about culture but I do know that there is more to it than whether people will play after hours.
I learned how to be a human-centric recruiter in an agency whose leaders genuinely cared about people and their success. Over the years, though, after being integrated into another agency, the culture became toxic. The leadership changed to wide-boy gun-to-the-head management. Only making money mattered; humans didn’t. While I billed well, I was vaguely respected, but so vile and immature were two of the managers that during the 2008 crash, they stopped speaking to me for 6 months. All previous success was disregarded because I wasn’t billing as well. The culture declined due to the management style… and there was plenty of post-work play.
During those years, an older wiser team leader was stuck managing me. Papa Smurf, as I still call him, was from the original agency; married and a father, he didn’t socialise with us often. Today, he might be ruled out for not fitting some imagined culture because he was older with different priorities, but what he brought to me I will never forget.
As I wrote in The Damage of Words, publishing on May 27, then I was a self-loathing unhealed victim of child abuse and incredibly defensive. I was hell to manage because any critique would lead to extreme and vicious anger or floods of tears. Yet, because he had a wealth of experiences to draw on, he was one of the few who could steer and support me. To this day I am grateful for his wisdom and perseverance.
Before you rule someone out because they are older and may not wish to party out of hours, consider what you will miss without that experienced pair of hands for guidance and counsel.
Final thoughts
If this is insufficient to make you pause, then read the comments on my original post and the relevant laws in your country. Laws I hope you’ll never need to use in later life.
Growing old is a gift.
For the fellow ’71 babies, I loved who are no longer here, know I am planning this…
