I feel sorry for human resource people nowadays. HR is marginalized. No one really pays much attention to what's going on in HR and HR struggles with the fact that what is prevalent in America today is job boards, huge databases that we use to recruit and hire people.

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.

Remember, the word "discrimination" isn't always pejorative. When an employer discriminates because an older worker lacks certain kinds of skills that are important in the market today, then it's almost a legitimate form of discrimination because the employer is just trying to figure out who can actually get the job done.

I 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.

Only a human being would be able to assess whether candidates are capable, personality-wise, of sharing and disseminating that institutional knowledge to help other newer and younger workers.

Sure, some employers are are afraid of letting older workers go because they think they're going to get sued. And they probably will get sued. But the reality is, you could get sued at any time by any kind of worker. I think its incumbent on an employer, if they want to be smart, to figure out what is the benefit of keeping this employee or letting them go. Do the calculation and just go ahead and either keep them or let them go based on what's good for the business.

There is age discrimination, but I think there are two kinds. One is when the employer is discriminating for specific reasons and doing it intentionally. The other is where you have managers who really aren't looking to discriminate but feel a little on edge because the candidate they're talking to is older. Sometimes they can even smell age concern on the part of the candidate and they wind up discriminating almost unconsciously.