I think what's happening is companies are trying to maximize shareholder value and I think they realized that if they could hire more effectively, they would. What I'm suggesting, though, is that human resources departments in most companies have become so detached - have become such a bureaucracy - that they have become clueless. They don't realize that the processes they have put in place have very little to do with recruiting, retaining and bringing on talent.
Nick CorcodilosCompanies are missing out on phenomenal skills and capabilities of experienced older job hunters: wealth of knowledge, expertise, seasoning, maturity. Companies need to be reminded of that.
Nick CorcodilosI really think you cannot separate the money from the age. When employers discriminate over age, they're also discriminating over money. Older workers tend to make more money, especially the higher up you go, and companies don't want to spend the money. They want to spend less.
Nick CorcodilosI think that the big age problem in the job market today is really on the part of employers and that they don't seem to be calculating the cost of age discrimination to them when they practice it.
Nick CorcodilosOn a strategic level, employers really are behaving stupidly. Look at how they do recruiting: this automated process under which they will publish a job description chock full of so-called "key words", and then have software algorithms that attempt to match applicants to the resumes against those key words. So where in the key word collection do we capture institutional knowledge? No one advertises for that. Of course they don't.
Nick CorcodilosI really don't think that an older worker can stop age discrimination, but you can successfully distract the employer from that issue if you focus on the reason they really want to hire you and that can make you more successful. It's up to you to demonstrate that.
Nick CorcodilosWhen you're not recruiting effectively you're not recruiting properly through a certain channel, like a job board, then what's left of you? I don't believe HR's been able to figure that out. They need to go back to the way they used to do it. They complained that they got so many millions of applicants, they couldn't possibly spend the amount of human time on all those applicants. But they could solve the problem tomorrow if they stopped soliciting millions of applicants through job boards.
Nick Corcodilos