The most successful people are those who are wildly enthusiastic about their work.

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.

I 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.

There are some older workers - probably a lot - who simply don't have the skills or the wherewithal to do a certain kind of job. There, it's up to the worker to go out and bring themselves up to speed and do it in an aggressive way, do it as quickly as possible.

On 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.

An online job search seems cheaper. But what HR is doing is turning away valuable candidates. They're experiencing false negatives. That means the right person applies for the job electronically but the algorithm kicks them out so they lose that individual.

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.