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.

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

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.

I think stupidity in business is really an interesting thing. What winds up happening is a disconnect between your company's strategic management and then your more applied on-the-street management. I guarantee with you that the board of directors of most companies has no idea what the costs of hiring people really is in the HR department.

When 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.

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.

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.