Age Inclusion
A Manager's Guide to Hiring
Evaluate Based on the Strengths that Matter Most
Choose the Right Hiring Panel and Train Together
Minimize Early Bias in the Interview Process
Design a Fair and Consistent Interview Process
Private: Create a Supportive and Inclusive Environment
Choose the Right Hiring Panel and Train Together
A carefully selected hiring committee, trained to use best practices when interviewing and assessing candidates, reduces bias in hiring decisions.
Ensure your interviewers and others involved in hiring for this role bring varied perspectives– but are all on the same page with best practices to hire well. Here are some tips:
Seek diverse perspectives on every candidate interviewed. When choosing your hiring committee, you likely already aim for a group of people from varied backgrounds, viewpoints and lived experiences. Begin to look for age diversity among your hiring panel, too. If the panel members are all similar in age, reframe any inadvertently age biased feedback that comes up in the group’s discussion.
Gather your full hiring team for a kick off meeting. Review key elements of your hiring process and tools that are important for all hiring team members to use, and if age is not usually discussed in your conversations about being unbiased, remind the team that it should be.
As a recruiter, check in with each member of the hiring team individually after each round of interviews. The most effective time to interrupt age bias is in the moment, or soon after, it happens with a hiring committee member. Listen to hear how consistently inclusive hiring practices are being used, and provide ideas on how the team can strengthen their hiring process– and thus outcome.
Consider hosting a team training workshop on Hiring a Multigenerational Team. You can use AARP’s free DIY workshop resources or invite an AARP guest facilitator to join you.
Minimize Early Bias in the Interview Process
There are simple tactics that don’t add extra time or effort to the hiring process, but can meaningfully decrease the chance for bias to creep in.
Try to use these best practices in each round of interviews– first with a recruiter, then by a hiring manager and interview panel.
Schedule older candidates first to help offset the unconscious bias that is often influenced by interview order. This can help avoid anchoring your impression of all candidates around someone younger — especially when visual age cues are involved.
When possible, conduct early interviews by phone or audio-only to focus on skills and experience, not appearance. If a visual format (either online or in-person) is necessary, stay mindful of the unconscious assumptions you may make based on age.
It’s natural to want to put candidates at ease as you start the interview, but remember to stick to neutral topics like weather or traffic. We all know not to ask female candidates about children, but a question like “oh my dad went to the same college as you did – when did you graduate?” can reveal unconscious assumptions about the candidate’s age and even create legal risk.
Design a Fair and Consistent Interview Process
A structured approach is more successful than unstructured interviews for predicting success in the job — not just for reducing bias in hiring. Focus on consistently assessing each candidate’s capacity to bring the Core Five Skills to the team.
Here are some best practices to consider. It’s important that all members of your hiring team and interview panel use them.
Ask concise, clear questions and pace the conversation so candidates have time to consider their responses and speak directly to the qualifications you are seeking. Older brains have built billions of connections which make them rich in context but slower in processing speed than younger brains. Younger candidates may stumble or freeze. Resist the urge to interrupt or fill in conversational pauses.
Ensure all interviewers ask every candidate the same questions, in the same order. Reinforce for all interviewers that this structured approach may feel a bit uncomfortable but it will lead to a deeper, fairer assessment of all candidates.
Draft interview questions that help you assess skills rather than check boxes. Instead of asking ‘How comfortable are you with Excel?’ say ‘Here’s a data set. How would you find out X?’ For more complex skills, such as project management, pose a problem or a task that candidates are likely to encounter on the job and ask them to describe in detail how they would handle it.
During each interview, use a simple scorecard that has a rubric of the Core Five Skills you defined at the start of the hiring process. Immediately after the candidate’s response to each question, jot notes and a score. Each interviewer should fill out the same form for each candidate and do so independently. Don’t chat with other interviewers about candidates until you are all in the hiring team meeting, as doing so can trigger selection bias.
Private: Create a Supportive and Inclusive Environment
A structured approach is more successful than unstructured interviews for predicting success in the job — not just for reducing bias in hiring. Focus on consistently assessing each candidate’s capacity to bring the Core Five Skills to the team.
These practices create an interview environment where older candidates can thrive, and are similar to those that bring out the full potential of more introverted and neurodiverse candidates.
Try to ensure a broad range of ages among interviewers in all rounds of interviews. Without this proactive effort, older interviewers may not become part of the hiring process until a final interview round with a senior leader. If early round interviews are done by an age-homogenous group, selection bias is more likely to occur.
Ask concise, clear questions and pace the conversation so candidates have time to consider their responses and speak directly to the qualifications you are seeking. Older brains have built billions of connections which make them rich in context but slower in processing speed than younger brains. By contrast younger candidates may stumble or freeze. Resist the urge to interrupt or fill in conversational pauses.