Fiona Cootes is a highly experienced events manager with more than twenty years of event management experience. Now she’s wrestling with age discrimination in the labor market. At 58 years old, she’s been looking for work continuously for more than a year since her last contract ended. Poor Laura’s worst fortune employers could be viewing her as “too old.” Cootes, who has a remarkable background that includes stints with the Queensland government, a five-star hotel and the Census, is disheartened by today’s hiring climate.
Cootes is afraid to put her entire experience on her resume. To counter this perceived age bias, she will now only put the last 10 years of work on her resume. And people wonder why I used to assert that I had more than 20 years of experience in my applications. A peer suggested that I call it ‘deep experience’ instead. This change is just one sign of an increasing worry among older job seekers that their age will make them less employable.
The difficulty in getting interviews proved to be an insurmountable challenge for Cootes, who says he felt “old and irrelevant.” She expressed her fears about her future job prospects: “I’ve never felt old, but this is the first time in my life that I’ve been made to feel old and irrelevant and scared for my future, that I might not get another job.” Cootes’s experience highlights a growing phenomenon in the American workforce. Almost one of every four employers today describes workers over 50 as “old” and refuses to hire them.
New evidence suggests that attitudes about age may be changing amongst employers. Nearly a quarter of the survey’s respondents do indeed consider people from 51 to 55 years old elderly. This perception has more than doubled since 2021. Only 28% of HR professionals show strong willingness to hire people between 50-64. They are hungry to attract more experienced talent to their organizations. Just 28% say they would be open to voting for candidates age 65 and older.
Robert Fitzgerald is the age discrimination commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC). We really need diverse teams, and those diverse teams need to include older incorporated workers. What we’re witnessing is age bias on both sides of the age spectrum. Unfortunately, this only serves to erode diversity of thought and productivity,” he stated. Fitzgerald said that companies can reap substantial benefits by creating a workplace where older and younger workers can learn from each other.
That reluctance to hire older workers continues even in the face of increasing labor shortages. Sarah McCann-Bartlett, CEO of the Australian HR Institute, emphasized that most employers are still reluctant to hire people aged 50+ years. “It found that employers are more and more recognizing workers as seniors at a younger age,” McCann-Bartlett said. She went on, “Human lives are being discounted long before people even get to retirement age. Almost a quarter of respondents think that someone who is 51-55 years old is already old, more than twice as many as in 2023.”
Cootes’s experience is not unique and resonates with many older job seekers who find themselves in similar situations. She highlights the anger with which she was met with the advice to “just take any job” while looking for one herself. “And what does that do for my confidence when I’ve been working for dozens of years,” she asked. “I’m worth more than that to go back to the bottom of the food chain again.”
Against the backdrop of this adversity, experts are calling for more inclusive practices in the workplace. Still, Fitzgerald urges employers to focus more on competency, regardless of a person’s age or career level. He challenges that “employers have a role to play by building inclusive workplaces, which means competency isn’t measured based on age or career level.” McCann-Bartlett echoes this sentiment, emphasizing that in a tight labor market, tapping into the full potential of available labor means enhancing inclusive practices for individuals at every career stage.
Cootes’s journey reflects a critical moment for older workers in today’s economy. She brings deep expertise and experience to the position. She knows she has much more to give, and to any company large or small, she wants to produce big wins. As her 23-year battle shows, we have to change how employers think about age.
