In this video, I discuss a huge market you’re missing when targeting your recruiting efforts.
I want to talk to you as an HR professional, hiring manager, small business owner about one of the sources of talent that I think is remarkably under utilized, or under targeted by employers.
You know, I was reminded this . . . I'm just doing a video for job hunters, who are over 60 and there was something that infuriated me when I was looking at some of the statistics. Like one of the top jobs for employees over 60 was school crossing guard. What the hell is going on? Let me just explain something to you.
Most of your organizations have trouble attracting millennials. Most of your organizations ignore targeting over 60. Yeah, you may give yourself the line about they won't fit in or they're not going to stay with us for very long, they're just doing this until they retire.
But tell me about the Millennial you're planning on having them around for more than five years, right? What's the turnover rate for millennials? What's the turnover rate for Boomers? You can go on and on and no one is staying in jobs for 5, 10 years.
Those who are older workers, frankly, are and enormous source of talent. Yeah, if they don't fit in, because they don't know the skill needed for the job, turn them down. But, you know, I think you'll start to notice that there's bias in your hiring process. When you start to notice the number of people who are in their 30s that are being hired versus those in their 60s when they were in competitive situations.
Approach your hiring managers. Ask them a simple question. What was the perceived deficiency in the older worker? You see, these are part of a protected class. And when you're dealing with someone 60 to 65, it's not like they don't have experienced to manage. They do. Some of them will have strong technical skills or professional skills that will allow them to function extremely well on a day to day basis.
So, I want to encourage you to flush up the bias in the organization and expose it. It doesn't have to be done in a confrontational way, like that example I gave. "What did you perceive the deficiency to be in that older worker," is a great question for a hiring manager to have them start to explore their own discriminatory patterns?
Yeah, I know, there's some cultures that prefer the older worker. I've been talking to someone in Saudi about appearing on Job Search Radio. He discovered me initially because he was looking for advice, saw that I was older and, culturally, he's been trained to accept the advice of his elders. Not exactly the American model, is it?
As such, this sort of bias causes your organization to miss out on exceptional talent, who will be loyal for a number of years, who can train their successor very well, and do a super job of mentoring upward, if that's what's called for. Again, ignoring the over 60 worker is a huge mistake, just like ignoring the under 30 worker is a huge mistake. They tend not to compete for the same jobs anyway. But if you keep looking for someone who's 40 years old, who's got an eight to 10 years of experience, you're just using objective criteria to reinforce your own biases.
