Why Nobody Wants to Hire Experienced People

And what that leads to for people and companies

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Photo by John Moeses Bauan on Unsplash

Even though there is a demand for experts, it is at the same time difficult for people older than a certain age to get a job. Age is of course not the same as expertise, but in many businesses, it is seen how age itself, expertise or not, will disqualify a candidate.

The source of the mishap

There is a big difference between young, naive and irresponsible on the one hand, and older, wiser and considerate on the other hand. Through the last few decades, we have learned to appreciate the characteristics of the young and disrespect those of the old. Beauty, physical strength, good teeth, whatever. Everything connected to youth is considered good by most people. And this goes even further, as being wise is certainly not indicating youth — therefore, you will see a lot of people deliberately playing a bit stupid and acting against better knowledge, simply because that will make them look younger in the eyes of others.

Personally, I have met this idea in many shapes throughout my career. A typical result of it is a question like “are you taking chances, acting fast?”, in a job interview, where the interviewer then clearly expects that you will answer “yes, I am very fast in making decisions and I often take chances, accepting huge risks”. Wisdom, the experience of a long life, will tell you that you almost never make better decisions by making them fast, and that a “fast mentality” most likely will make you focus too much on the immediate and urgent, and too little on the prosperous and important. You will spend your life fighting fires instead of building a safe and sound company. But the idea of youth to rule out wisdom makes a considerate mind look wrong in the eyes of a recruiter.

Youth is contaminating. That’s a belief that many have. By being surrounded by young, fast, and irresponsible people, you yourself will magically turn younger. Many job announcements are trying to catch you with phrases like “young environment” or rhetorical questions like “do you like to be very busy in a fast-paced environment?”.

An added reason

The prevalent focus on teamwork as the way of organizing work contributes to the madness. Teamwork is a very good way of bringing in all competencies into a combined effort — if that is what you want. But more often than not, teamwork is being abused for dragging down the quality and efficiency to a level corresponding to what everybody in the team can or could handle — because there is a common misinterpretation of the team idea that all team members should be equal and be able to replace each other on every task.

This is the rule of the smallest common denominator — the team will be no stronger than the weakest link, so to speak, but as it counts for each individual task, the team can easily end up being much weaker than any of the team members would be as individuals.

In order to make an effort that fits into the team plan and the skills of the teammates, each team member is expected to avoid showing off. There is no point in doing work at a level or a quality that the others cannot handle — it can actually lead to (as I have seen several times) a requirement to delete the good work and then redo it in a less good quality.

The problem

Of course, this is not good. Behaving like teenagers can easily kill even a big and serious company (and regularly does, I guess). Lots of management guidelines are about making the team work and putting restrictions on any behaviour as individuals. They are, actually, about preventing good work from appearing.

It is common to believe that you can learn from your mistakes — only. So young people who make more mistakes are considered more fit for the learning organization — a management idea that actually has a very good and sound idea behind it, but which is often completely misunderstood by management. They believe that only common learning is useful — only what the whole bunch of employees know in common. They never understand that individuals could contribute a lot, being given the chance.

The remedy

Understand that youth is not the same as good. Youth can be good, but so can wisdom. If you want to run a company in a professional manner, the employees and managers alike must behave like adults, taking their jobs seriously and trying to do what is needed for success. And that might well be something else than what leads to success in your private life.

Quite simple — for the one who is not young, who has experience: stay away from companies that clearly cultivate the idea of youth as superior to wisdom, speed as superior to consideration. They will only ruin your life and you will not be allowed to make use of your wisdom anyway; you will always be measured against the norms of youth.

For people inside a company who have a chance of making changes (be they young or old): start making teams work by forming them from people of different ages and with different skill sets. Enforce a style where firefighting is less heroic than proactive prevention of problems, and where applied wisdom (for instance from lessons learned and similar techniques) is a measure of success. Introduce analytical behaviour and business analysis activities with a focus on making everybody understand other people’s needs and wishes throughout the whole process of doing anything.

For people recruiting others: start thinking further ahead — do not solve an immediate problem where a gap in the organizational diagram must be filled out, find instead people who have the potential of applying their wisdom in several positions, allowing them to start in one place of the company and then move around with the needs. Do not look for an exact replacement for an employee who left — accept that new employees have their own individual qualities. Do not ask that stupid question of risk taking, focus instead on how the candidate will be able to measure the risk level and make a sound decision — and especially, how the candidate is capable of being proactive.

That would, all together, lead to a more professional way of doing business and to better results where employees can actually be proud of what they know and what they do.

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This piece was first published on 21 December 2014 at LinkedIn. It was picked out by curation to be part of LinkedIn Pulse — or to be “boosted”, as it would be called in some other social media.

Different times

I believe that times were different back then, in 2014, and that the ageism is less clear in the job market now — except for a bunch of positions where, still, only young people are being considered to be suitable candidates.

There seems to be a tendency, even, in a few companies, to actually mix young and old, as I suggested it in the article. Still not with a strategy of mixing different skills, but perhaps with a slightly better acceptance of people with an alternative background, as long as they can demonstrate the same skills as the preferred ones.

Now, of course, with all the mass-layoffs that have been going on for a while and probably still will for some more time to come, we will probably see a shift toward hiring younger staff again, for cost reasons but also because new and younger managers will be reluctant to hire anyone older than themselves.

A hope

Except for the leaderless organizations! If you and your colleagues have agreed to do the leadership parts of the work in common — each of you taking the role as needed, for individual tasks, but accepting that others are leading other tasks, then you may see a different focus: it will soon become clear that everybody will benefit from having different skills in the team, as there will then always be someone with exactly that skill, experience — and wish — needed to do something.

In such an environment, people learn to appreciate each other's wants and needs, as these are what makes the everyday function.