Data from the Office of National Statistics shows that approximately 1m people in the UK have left work since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, with retirement the most popular reason given by people aged between 50-70.

In a prolonged period of candidate scarcity we must ensure we are accessing talent from as wide a pool as possible, but there’s not much evidence that recruiters are specifically focused on tapping into the rich seam of talent found in older workers.

Lucy Tootell of Temporis Legal Recruitment is a notable exception, with 40% of her locums aged 60-plus. “Our clients are paying a premium for locums so they’re looking for highly experienced candidates and our older locums have plenty of that,” she says.

Of course, older workers are as diverse a group as other workers, but a recent study from the Department of Work and Pensions found that over 75% of businesses agreed that “the experience of workers aged 50 or older was a main benefit of employing them in their organisation, followed by the reliability of workers in this age group and the mentoring older workers provide to new workers”.

There are important features that you and your clients need to understand to attract older workers. One key offer is flexibility. While older workers are less likely to have young children making calls on their time they’re more likely to have other caring responsibilities like ageing parents. They’re not called the ‘sandwich generation’ for nothing.

The flexibility to choose how to fit work around their other responsibilities will make returning to work more attractive. For the same reason the ability to work remotely for some of the time will also help. Also, there are good examples of older workers who prefer the traditional Monday to Friday in the office at a desk, so choice is the driver here.

A Chartered Management Institute survey of more than 1,000 UK managers found that 42% would be open to hiring people aged between 50-64 to a large extent. That’s plenty of hiring managers for us to work with, but what about the 58% who aren’t so open?

Right now, when their options are limited is a great time for recruiters to make the argument and as talent acquisition experts we have a responsibility to lead the way in this area.

Helping clients to focus more on the skills and experience available and less on irrelevant age can really help here.

A recent Deloitte survey showed 40% of Gen Z workers plan to change jobs in the next two years. Older workers can be less interested in climbing the promotion ladder, so stability is definitely a feature. They can be effective mentors for those people at the start of their careers sharing real life experience particularly of managing others.

And what about our industry itself. Whilst many owners/founders would comfortably fit the definition of ‘older’ worker, and many shout about the benefits of diversity, when we recruit trainees it’s almost exclusively young people fresh from university or with one or two years of work experience.

With the shortage of candidates being the main thing that recruiters say is holding them back, and the myriad benefits of a diverse workforce, wouldn’t it make sense to hire some older workers ourselves?

Heather Salway is director at Jump Advisory

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