They're skilled, they're smart, they're seasoned. Why isn't anyone hiring these over-fifties?

When David Weiss’s boss asked to meet him in the conference room at 1:00, just weeks after he’d sailed through his performance evaluation, he knew it wasn’t a good sign. When he walked out of the meeting, he was out of a job. After close to 20 years as a solid performer at a global finance and software company, David was laid off in what he calls a purge of dozens of employees, all of them over 55.

“When I asked them why, they dithered and mentioned the few times I had come late during Selichos, half a year earlier. I pushed for more, but they said they couldn’t go into details,” he recalls. As he tied up loose ends over the next few days, he observed the new hires trickling in. Almost all of them were under 30 years old.

But if being fired for no reason felt like a punch in the gut, the ensuing job search was a total knockout.

“I sent out dozens of résumés online and made many new connections on LinkedIn, but despite my valuable corporate experience, I didn’t net a single interview,” David shares. “I got smart and deleted my graduation date, and removed 25 years’ worth of experience from my résumé to hide my age, but still nothing. Companies research your online profile within minutes, and a gray-haired LinkedIn picture can be all it takes to get passed over. A headhunter told me that a major Wall Street firm told him point-blank, ‘Don’t send us any applicants over 45, because we won’t take them.’ ”

Aware of the odds he was facing, and determined to find work, David was open to a complete career change at a significant pay cut, and he ultimately found a job in the diamond district. But others who were fired alongside him close to three years ago struggled for many months, and some are still job hunting. He’s convinced ageism is the cause.

David isn’t the only one with that perception. An AARP survey in 2018 found that 78 percent of workers over age 45 see age discrimination as a hurdle to getting a job. An employee at another networking company says that “multiple headhunters have told me not to send them anyone over age 40.” According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, job seekers over the age of 55 take the longest to find employment. In 2019, Google agreed to a multimillion-dollar settlement in a federal lawsuit charging that the company systematically discriminated based on age in its hiring process, its second major age-discrimination lawsuit in less than ten years. In March 2021, a similar claim was brought against accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in a 3,500-member collective action lawsuit; they settled on a multimillion-dollar payout and agreed to enhance their recruiting practices.

With all the negative publicity around age bias, it’s still hard to deny that age-related factors can — sometimes — negatively impact job performance. Disentangling sound basis from bias is tricky, but doing so allows a business to make the smartest hiring choices.