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No Desire To Retire – But how?
Natasha Oppenheim is CEO of No Desire To Retire, providing job advicefor over 50s, and Experients its dedicated recruitment and resourcing company.
Finding work via recruitment agencies
How do you know ifrecruitment agencies have older workers in mind? I guess the short answer isthat you don’t. It’s a sad fact thatolder applicants are often less successful with online applications, and thatincludes with recruitment agencies. This is why Anglia Ruskin University foundthat older workers are 20% less likely to be called for interview from anonline application than younger workers [1].Does this resonate with you?
The good and bad of algorithms
In theory, recruitmentagencies should treat everyone as equal which is why many agencies usealgorithms. Algorithms in recruitment can begreat in that they take away the element of conscious bias of trying to hiresomeone like the recruiter, and they enable sorting of applicants at volume.
However, it’s not justthe people who may or may not have unconscious bias against age, or gender, orethnicity but also the software itself, which can be targeted to filter outdifferent attributes, for example, applicants with more than15 years’experience. Even huge companies such asFacebook have fallen foul of this [2].
Additionally, algorithms failto capture a whole area of skills that are developed over time, such asattitude, loyalty, expertise and soft skills like negotiation. This is to thedetriment of employers who miss out on candidates with those skills and whichoften determine whether a candidate will succeed in a role, and also to thedetriment of older workers who often excel in these areas.
Bespoke recruiting for experience
Since 2012 No DesireTo Retire has worked with the over 50 demographic, who are looking to get backto work and who face invisible hurdles. Having spoken to many of our 28,000members we realised that to help get our members back to work we should placethem directly, so we launched Experients, our dedicated recruitment andresourcing company. Experients isuniquely dedicated to working with this over 50s demographic or experiencedworkers, offering a 'safe space' where applicants know that they won't bescreened out or have their CV discounted on basis of age. In fact, it’s quitethe opposite as we are looking for experienced mature candidates. Moreover, theemployers we work with are also specifically looking for over 50s talent.
Therefore, the natureof the roles we get do not lend themselves to less experienced (younger)candidates, and often require a particular skill set and attitude. This feedsinto our more bespoke, personal approach where we personally match the mostappropriate candidates to the role to ensure the best fit as opposed to ascatter-gun approach. This reduces the risk for both sides of the recruitmentprocess ensuring a higher satisfaction for the role for both employer andcandidate.
At a time when theeconomy will need all the experienced help it can get to recover from theCOVID-19 impact, increasing the participation in the workforce of older workerscould provide the answer.
[1] https://aru.ac.uk/news/ageism-still-significant-in-uk-labour-market
[2] https://www.aarp.org/work/working-at-50-plus/info-2019/facebook-settles-discrimination-lawsuits.html
