Many older people believe age discrimination is driven by the employers’ Agents, not by the employers themselves…
Wrong!
Agents are just the ‘Bad News Messengers’. Even enlightened recruiters struggle to resist Ageism that is embedded so deeply in the Western World. Our research proves most employers discriminate, but don’t believe they do. They just believe The 4 Myths about Older Workers. So, nothing illegal here! “We’re just selecting people who are the most productive and best fit our teams”.
Here’s the story of one of Australia’s most successful recruiting agents, Graham Jenkins, and has over 25 years recruiting. Despite being mature himself and despising discrimination of all types, his record on getting the mature into jobs is depressing…
- Only 1 person over 60 offered an interview
- Only 1 person over 50 hired
A tragic but very common story, including my own experience. I’ve had 20 years in recruitment and only succeeded in getting 2 people 50+ into jobs. With one of them I pressured the CEO into offering the job. Unfortunately I had now set the candidate up to fail as his 30 year old supervisor didn’t want an oldie on his team. He was frozen out in under 6 months.
Now, over 95% of recruiters are primarily sales people, and their only real KPI is revenue, so why would they give themselves grief like that? Just a waste of everybody’s time – I certainly never pressured an employer that hard again.
So it’s the employers who are mainly to blame, not their Agents. Too often their briefing to Agents includes these words…
- “Our team is young, so best you find someone compatible with that culture”, or…
- “We need someone high energy so they’ll probably be under 40”
Guess their Agents know someone over 40 is a mission impossible!
It has taken us 8 months of research to finally understand why the majority of Australian employers regularly break the law. Many do it hundreds, even thousands of times a year. They simply don’t know they’re discriminating.
Sad but all too true!
Live in Australia and over 45?
