When is someone too old to work or too old to get hired?
According to many employers, 62 is the cutoff for working, and 58 for hiring.
It begs the question: What planet are they on?
“Many employers are focusing on diversity, equity, and inclusion, but they may be overlooking age in their hiring efforts,” said Catherine Collinson, CEO and president of Transamerica Institute and the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies, which conducted the recent study.
Roughly 1 in 5 Americans age 65 and older were employed in 2023, four times the number in the mid-1980s. That chalks up to around 11 million workers.
They’re working more hours, on average, than in previous decades. Today, 62% of older workers are working full time, compared with 47% in 1987, according to the Pew Research Center. And they’re more likely to have a four-year college degree than in the past.
“Older workers want and need to work beyond traditional retirement age,” Collinson said. “They’re not financially ready to retire, and they may enjoy what they do. However, they can only succeed if employers are welcoming and supportive.”
That’s a stumbling block because workers of all ages need to be consistently honing and adding skills to keep up with new technologies in order to stay on the job.
“What has been left unaddressed is how we are going to ensure that this part of the workforce is prepared for the never-ending changing nature of work,” Ramona Schindelheim, WorkingNation editor in chief, told Yahoo Finance. “Training and upskilling are still targeted toward a younger generation.”
More than half of employers say that their company culture “emphasizes professional growth and development among employees of all ages, including those age 50 and older,” per the Transamerica data, yet a fraction — 2 in 10 — emphasize it a “great deal.”
“Without thought to this part of the labor force, I fear that these older workers won’t have the opportunity to advance in their jobs and will be relegated to lower-wage, lower-skill work,” Schindelheim said.
Low unemployment among workers 55 and older
Historically, employers’ recruiting practices have overlooked older workers, but among those with job openings last year, more than half said they gave “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of consideration to job applicants ages 50 and older, according to the Transamerica Institute’s “Workplace Transformations” report.
That’s encouraging. The word “consideration” doesn’t necessarily translate to landing a position, but there’s new evidence that hiring is up for workers in this age cadre. The unemployment rate for workers 55 and older fell from 2.8% in February to 2.6% last month, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. That’s the lowest point since last July.
Not to be too cynical, but that may have had more to do with a relatively tight labor market that still has employers scrambling to fill open jobs with workers who can get the job done right now, over a change of heart about hiring someone viewed as pushing their expiration date.
“Retaining and hiring older workers has become critical to our organization because it is more difficult in the rural environment to find qualified workers,” Suzanne Cooner, 68, CEO of Audubon County Memorial Hospital and Clinics in Audubon, Iowa, told Yahoo Finance.
To make the workplace age-friendly, the hospital reduced the biweekly number of working hours to qualify for full-time benefits from 72 hours to 60 hours and now offers job sharing, phased retirement, and retire-to-rehire opportunities and retraining.
Al Comito, 62, the hospital’s chief information officer, was hired last year. For Comito, it’s not about the income. “I’ve been planning for retirement for a long time, and I am to the point where I feel financially secure,” he told Yahoo Finance. “If I wasn’t enjoying what I do, I would not be doing it. It gives me a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction … and purpose.”
At Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, finding qualified workers to fill open positions hit a bad patch. “We had to start thinking about looking for candidates in places we previously had not explored,” Maureen De Armond, executive director of human resources, told Yahoo Finance.
“In the hiring process, for example, we are now much more thoughtful about really whittling down our list of required qualifications. We may not need new employees to arrive with every skill set, so long as they are eager to learn,” she said.
Age-friendly — or not?
Then again, while almost 9 in 10 employers consider themselves to be age-friendly, according to the Transamerica report, fewer workers agree: Only 7 in 10 workers consider their employers to be age-friendly.
The most frequently cited programs they offer include traditional and/or reverse mentorships (50%), job training (44%), internships for individuals starting their careers or individuals reentering the workforce (40%), and professional development programs (35%).
Where they lag behind is providing work arrangements that can keep older employees working and earning longer. These include a phased retirement option, flexible work schedules, letting employees dial back hours and shift from full-time to part-time, or allowing them to take on jobs that are less stressful or demanding.
That adaptability matters because the bulk of the baby boomer generation is rolling into retirement with Generation Xers on their heels, and many are expecting a gradual transition into retirement as opposed to a cold stop.
Nonetheless, the majority, roughly 6 in 10 employers, don’t offer a formal phased retirement program for workers who want to transition into retirement.
Only half of employers are willing to adjust to flexible work schedules to help employees transition into retirement. And a fraction, 3 in 10, are up for shifting older workers who want to stay on the job to work that’s less stressful or demanding.
An aging workforce rises
Ageism is deeply rooted in so many companies and their hiring mojo that one wonders what it will take for hiring managers to realize that older workers are their future. Demographic changes demand it.
The pace of population aging is much faster than in the past, according to data from the World Health Organization. In 2020, the number of people aged 60 years and older outnumbered children younger than five years. Between 2015 and 2050, the proportion of the world’s population over 60 years will nearly double from 12% to 22%.
Between 2022 and 2032, the labor force participation rate of the 55-to-64 age group is projected to increase by more than three percentage points, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the same goes for those 65 to 74. The big jump is expected in the 75-and-older age group — a projected 9.9% in 2032. People in this group will be twice as likely to work as they were 40 years earlier. During the same time period, the younger workers on the job will likely decline.
Marlene Heuertz, a benefits specialist at Drake, has clocked in for more than two decades at the university and doesn’t feel too old to keep working. “I enjoy my job,” the 64-year-old told Yahoo Finance. “Even as I begin to contemplate retirement, the people are what keep me at Drake.”
