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.
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 CorcodilosThere 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.
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 CorcodilosAn 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.
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 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.
Nick Corcodilos