As employers struggle to fill open jobs and hire the talent they need to prosper and grow, they often overlook and even exclude a time-tested asset: older workers. Workers aged 50+ will make up a growing share of the labor force in the coming decade, and their expanding presence will be increasingly important to business operations and economic prosperity. Older workers offer employers the skills and knowledge needed to fill vacancies and mentor younger generations of workers. However, recruiting and screening processes continue to be plagued both by explicit discrimination and other mechanisms that disfavor older workers and lead to disparate hiring outcomes.
Even as many companies embrace a broad movement toward inclusive hiring, few include the role of older workers in these commitments. In fact, despite older workers being a federally protected class, fewer than half of companies worldwide specify age in their diversity and inclusion policies, according to a previous AARP survey. This often-neglected critical step is an important, easy win for employers to move toward more inclusive hiring.
Research by the Burning Glass Institute in partnership with AARP demonstrates the imperative for change among employers and policymakers –to ensure not only that older workers can contribute to the labor market at their highest capacity, but also so that employers gain access to a broad pool of experienced talent, which is critical with so many jobs going unfilled.
KEY FINDINGS:
One million job postings in 2022 contained age-biased language, such as “digital native” and “recent graduate,” even with a 23% decline in such language since the start of the pandemic. The use of age-biased language varies significantly across occupations and appears much more often in job postings for firms comprised mostly of younger workers, illustrating how biased hiring practices bear out in disparate workforce representation.
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