How over 50s can help your business (and how to hire them)

Officially, age discrimination in the recruitment process is illegal. But sadly, in practice, it definitely happens and many businesses are reluctant to hire older employees.

However, with the UK’s population ageing rapidly and an ongoing ‘hiring crisis’ resulting in a shortage of high-calibre applicants for available roles, companies need to get ahead of the game and start hiring over 50s.

And really, businesses shouldn’t have to be forced into it – while business owners of all ages may be tempted to favour younger employees, hiring over 50s and incorporating them into your company culture can really benefit your business and result in a more diverse and more effective workforce.

Here, we’ll explain just how hiring over 50s can help your business and give you expert advice on how to target this group.

How over 50s can help your business

Over 50s can help your business in a wide variety of ways.

For example, they often bring with them a wide network of contacts (often at senior level) that they have built up during their working lives. This might give your business a better chance at securing new clients, supply deals or favourable press coverage.

And, while there’s often a perception that older workers are less productive than their younger counterparts, a major academic study into age and productivity actually found the opposite was true. The COGITO study revealed that, on average, older people performed more consistently and reliably than younger people, and also displayed higher levels of focus.

What really came up when speaking to recruitment experts and business people though, was that hiring over 50s can help your business by offering new perspectives and mentoring younger employees.

New perspectives

There’s an increasing acceptance that a more diverse workforce equals a better business.

And very positive steps are being taken to, for example, make sure more women and people from underrepresented ethnic groups occupy senior positions in UK businesses.

However, we’re still generally stuck in old and outdated ways of thinking when it comes to age, and age and employment in particular.

Indeed, research from the Centre for Ageing Better found that one third of 50-69 year olds think their age would disadvantage them when applying for jobs.

This reflects a world of work that all too often neglects the different viewpoints and wealth of life experience that older employees (and especially the over 50s) can bring to a business.

Nilsson does however also emphasise the importance of hiring older employees that have the right mindset to tackle new challenges and potentially unfamiliar ways of working (such as Voi’s non-hierarchical structure).

Ensuring that these ideas are properly explained is the key to having an age inclusive workforce and benefiting from the accumulated knowledge of older employees.

Mentoring

As well as offering new perspectives, older employees can also play a hugely important role in mentoring their less experienced colleagues, passing on their skills and wisdom as they work together.

Finally, there’s also a good chance that older employees will be more loyal than younger employees that may just see your company as a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

So, businesses simply cannot afford to overlook the substantial talent pool of 50+ year olds that want to keep working on either a full-time or part-time basis.

But, how do you ensure that your hiring practices don’t exclude this group?

How to hire over 50s

We spoke to experts across the country about the best way to hire over 50s and three key strategies emerged: look at the language you use in job ads, make sure you’re advertising in the right places, and consider a completely “age-blind” application process.

Advertise in the right places

No matter how good your job ad is, if it’s not seen by older candidates, then it’s more or less useless.

Consider “blind” hiring

If you’ve never heard of blind hiring, the basic idea is to remove identifying information from CVs in order to avoid unconscious bias.

For example, you could hide names (to avoid racial and gender bias) and addresses (to avoid your perceptions of an area influencing your decision).

When it comes to age bias, the easiest first step is to remove dates of birth from CVs and application forms, and this is a positive move.

However, for a comprehensive age-blind hiring process, you would also need to remove identifying info from employment and education history.

So, what you would end up with is a CV/application form that listed the previous jobs a candidate had and the places that they studied, but not how long they worked/studied there or when they worked/studied there.

This does of course make the process of selecting candidates for interview more difficult, and may mean that you interview more candidates than you did previously in order to clear up any gaps in employment history or a CV where a candidate has had many previous jobs (which could either indicate an older candidate or a succession of short-term positions).

The simplest way to do blind hiring is simply to get a black marker and cross out parts of CVs, but digital recruitment platforms like Pinpoint offer an elegant solution where you can anonymise and standardise CVs with just a few clicks.

While blind hiring is a good way to reduce the impact of unconscious bias and increases the chances of a more diverse candidate pool being invited to the interview stage, as this blind hiring guide from Glassdoor makes clear, it won’t increase the diversity of your workforce on its own.

This approach needs to be paired with other key steps to ensure a fairer hiring process.

For example, it’s crucial that people making hiring decisions receive specialised training to make them aware of their unconscious biases and recognise when they might be influenced by them.

And you also need to ensure you have a standardised interview process, perhaps including scorecards so potential hires are judged on their skills rather than other factors.

Blind hiring is a big step but incorporating it into your hiring process and company culture more generally can help to ensure a more diverse and effective business.

Final thoughts

Hiring over 50s should be seen as far far more than a last resort option in a hiring crisis.

As we’ve discussed, more mature hires should be a key part of a diverse and representative workforce, one that can offer new perspectives, share their valuable experience, and play a key role in mentoring younger employees.

To help attract over 50s, you need to consider the language you use in your job ads, make sure your social media job ads are being shown to a range of age groups, think about advertising on specialist job boards or targeting university alumni associations, and maybe even implement a blind hiring process to address unconscious biases.

Really though, it all starts with a change of mindset and a recognition throughout the company that older employees can often bring a unique set of skills and qualities that make the business better.

The more this is accepted (especially by key decision makers), the better chance you’ll have of attracting high-calibre over 50s that can help you achieve your business goals.