Why do employers seemingly not want to hire middle-aged and older people?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I seem to constantly hear that once you turn 40, employers don’t want to hire you.

I’ve gotten advice that you should start your own business, or enter your own profession (accounting, etc), so that you don’t have to get ‘hired’ again, if you lose your job later in life.

Today in the NY Times, a 50 year old former executive is waiting tables:

“agencies are “not hiring middle-aged people, especially with his qualifications, when they’re not sure what’s going to happen next.””

So my question is WHY is there such a negative response from employers for those applying over 40?

I would have thought that:

–The average manager is middle aged himself and would respect other people who are near his age.

–Older people have more experience

–Because of the baby boom, there may be more people in their 40’s than their 20’s (at least who are educated) ??

–Most jobs are ‘at-will’ in the United States, so employers can easily hire a 40 year old and fire them if they want in 15 years

–Most jobs have 401k’s and not pensions

–While older employees may use more health insurance benefits and sick days, it’s really a minor thing to consider when hiring, and the hiring manager probably wouldn’t care

So while I understand that a high ranking person who is 50 or more would have a hard time getting a similar job in a bad economy, as evidenced in the article above, it seems that the ‘discrimination’ against the over 40 types is more than should be logical.

???

2

I’ve absolutely had to deal with this myself when I’ve been on the job market and it’s unbelievable when it happens to you.

My take is there is a perception that if you hire an older person, they’re more likely to be set in their ways, more likely to challenge you about what you’re doing, and more likely not to want to crawl over broken glass to further their career.

As a form of discrimination it’s galling, but largely hidden. What a waste of great resources. Should change over time as population ages and there are fewer young people to fill roles. Of course, that may be wishful thinking…

3

Oops meant to say ‘employers’ in the title

4

Fixed.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

5

I assumed it was because

  1. They’d have to pay you more for your years of experience,
  2. They’d get less years out of you before retirement, and
  3. Their group health insurance rates would go up because the average employee age would increase.
6

It might also be that older people have more baggage - jobs left, etc. Younger people might also be seen as more ambitious. If you start at a staff job at 40, you’re unlikely to be bucking to be CEO some day.

In high tech jobs, there is the perception (and perhaps the reality) that by 40 or older you’ve fallen behind. That’s true to a certain extent. Lots of stuff younger people learned in school, when there is time, I’ve had to teach myself, and several technologies I helped to invent are now widespread and very over specialized.

I didn’t have a lot of problems getting new jobs over 40, but I don’t doubt the problem.

7

I’m 62, and I was in my late 40s at the time of my last job interview. I pointed out to the person:

  1. I’ve already made all my mistakes, and learned from them. A younger person still has all his mistakes ahead of him.

  2. I have no intention of clawing my way up the corporate ladder; been there, done that. An aggressive younger person will always be trying to take your job away.

  3. A young person making mortgage and car payments will always be hitting you up for more pay. My house and car are paid for.

  4. I have more skills than you’ll ever need me to use.

I didn’t get the job.

8

Two issues:

  1. As you get older, you’ll keep advancing up the ladder to the point at which you’re not good enough to fill a position that high, at which point you’re fired/laid off.
  2. As you get older, your salary will continue to rise regardless of how high you have risen in the ladder.

So, anyone who is “old” and fired/laid off, is by easy logic, someone who was overpaid for work that he wasn’t good enough to hold. You’re better to promote someone internally to the position who looks promising, or to hire someone young who at least isn’t known to be incapable of the job and who will accept less money. Even if the guy was willing to take a job of a level one rank down from the one he left, there’s still the issue of pay. Even if he accepts a lower payscale–like what someone younger would accept–there’s a good chance that he’ll be dissatisfied for having had to take the pay cut.

Essentially the issue is a Survival of the Fittest thing. The triangle of a business hierarchy shrinks faster than the population expands. So for any time you want to hire in at the base from the fresh new young population, you have to bump everyone currently holding those positions up one rank in the business hierarchy (and everyone above them, up one, and so on.)

Now say you’ve got each manager managing 5 people, you’re taking on a new group of younguns every ten years, and the rate of population growth is +1% per year.

In the first year, our hierarchy will look like:

1
5
25
125
625

I.e. there’s one guy at the top rank, 5 at the next, and so on until there’s 625 fresh hires out of school. In ten years time, we’ll need to fill in a new group of fresh hires from school and we’ll take as many as we can to meet the expansion of the populace. This year there was 625, so adding 1% cumulatively over ten years gives us 690 people that we can accept fresh from school. Splitting that out to have a maximum of a 1 to 5 ratio at each level, we are looking for a hierarchy like:

1
2
6
28
138
690

So out of 625 people we had working in the lowest position, we have to dump 487 people to fill the 138 needed positions up the next level. That gives more than ample choice to find the best of the best without needing to look outside. Or if we do look outside, we want someone who was chosen as being worth keeping. If they were just promoted, that’s juiciest even.

At the bottom of the ladder, everyone is cheap enough and expendable enough that you can somewhat trust that they were laid off for reasons that had little to do with capability, or that they’ll learn from the experience. As you go up the ladder, you really don’t want to play around any. You only want people who weren’t fired/laid off. You want to promote from within or steal from another company.

9

Sounds like a good approach. Too bad it didn’t work, though maybe you ended up in a better place?

10

My employers (in TV production) are desperate to make a good hire (I was the last one, heh heh).

In my short tenure here, I’ve noticed that whenever we hire someone over 35, the resume is padded and he talks more than he listens. We’re not particularly picky about hiring, but it really does seem that the older folks have trouble going with the flow and learning new tricks, and don’t last more than a few months. Honestly, I’m frustrated as hell picking up slack for dudes I should be revering.

So the reticence to hire older people might come directly from people like me, who are perfectly well-seasoned (I’m 30), but are wary of working with folks who have had a lot of jobs and are still straddling between self-employment and low-level staff positions.

11

As a 36-year-old who likely won’t be at my current job forever, I do get nervous about this. I may need to develop entrepreneurial skills after all …

12

Yes, self-employed.

13

You have no idea how funny this is. Reminds me of a long-ago coworker who was fond of saying, “Hey, I’ve paid my dues.” She was 19.

14

Great, apparently THAT interview went even better. :stuck_out_tongue:

15

They already have a large supply of middle-aged and older employees that they’re desperately trying to get rid of. Why would they go out and hire more?

16

The laws on discrimination have protections for people over 40 which can make it very difficult to fire a person over 40. Of course, the reaction of businesses was to have an unwritten policy of not hiring people over 40 so the law itself resulted in discrimination.

Anecdotal. I worked in a company that had several suits against it for age discrimination. the head of personnel was constantly fending off the litigation. He was a real dickhead. When a new President was hired, the dickhead got fired (and he deserved it). So what did he do, he turned around and sued the company for age discrimination.

17

I would refine this a little bit to say that employers often avoid hiring people over 40+ in an open-market competitive placement situation. But many, many jobs are not filled that way: post 40, most job changes seem to come about as a result of being recruited or networking: post 40, you are more likely to have a specialized skill set and/or a network of people that you have worked for/with in the past. My mom and dad have both changed jobs many times since they were 40, but almost never have they responded to an ad or sent in a letter/resume (or if they did, it was as a formality, well into negotiations).

18

It’s not logical, and despite what people say in other responses to this thread, I see nothing that supports it.

This thread ought to be in Opinions, though. I haven’t seen any studies that really judge the productivity of “older” employees.

One thing may be true: “executives” looking for jobs may have a harder time. I myself have a prejudice against hiring a manager from the outside. A company has (or ought to have) a particular culture, and the best way to maintain it is to make managers from the inside. If the company is well-run and doesn’t promote people just to reward them, this probably works.

This is why I am much in favor of “dual-track” career paths at companies. If you want to manage, fine. But if you don’t, the company can still promote you to higher positions with greater rewards and responsibilities as an individual contributor.

That’s the path I want. I have no interest in management by title. I help my manager informally. I still have saleable skills that I can bring to a new job if I need to go somewhere else.

19

This.

And some of the “aging skills”, and some of the “don’t listen as much” and “aren’t as willing to learn new things”.

Perception wise, that is.

I think some of it is that companies hire inexperienced young women for their HR departments and some of these young things are terribly frightened by older, more confident men. I know I got some of that vibe from the mid-20’s woman I interviewed with last week. I mentioned something about having been working for nearly 30 years (I’m turning 46 this week) and it kinda spooked her, perhaps because that’s longer than she’s been alive.

Some of these people seem to expect potential job seekers to come in like the pitiful poor of the past (“Please sir, may I have another job?”), and are a bit less than comfortable when people who’ve been through it all fifty times over are anything less than bowing and scraping on the floor for their approval. They’re looking for someone they can bully, someone who will mindlessly do as their told (there’s a reason the army wants 18 year olds…). Not necessarily someone who will pause for thought and point out that their cunning plan hasn’t worked at several other places over the last 30 years.

Or like this one. I mentioned my Four Fouls Rule. If you order me to do something that is Illegal, Unethical, Dangerous or Stupid, I’m not doing it. I don’t think she could make up her mind whether or not that was a good thing. (It was in the context of me saying that I’m happy to do things that aren’t my job if the client asks me to do, but I have a rule about it.)

20

Agreed. Since it doesn’t look at this stage that specific factual information on the question is going to be forthcoming, I’m going to move this to IMHO.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator