Experienced Candidates Need Not Apply

At first glance, diversity doesn’t seem like an issue for the trendier, tech-based small businesses these days. Their Instagram-ready staff wouldn’t bat an eye at the thought of working alongside different genders, ethnicities, and abilities. They grew up on the right side of history in that regard and are proud champions of progressive workplace policies. For them, diversity and inclusion are not an uphill battle.

What won’t you see in this workplace?

“Old” people.

The old people I’m referring to are not octogenarians who have rightfully earned their place in peaceful retirement. I am describing talented, experienced individuals over 50. In fact, many of those workplaces would be hard-pressed to find anyone over 40 employed there. The founder might be an exception. Otherwise, the workforce remains happily in their 20s and 30s until the investors insist on having some grown-ups in the C suite to up the odds for the next round of funding.

How could such open-minded diversity champions become blinded by their own discrimination toward seasoned workers?  Cultural bias is a good place to start, both internal to the organization and externally reinforced by the business community.

The refusal of the hiring manager or HR to consider experienced applicants may be a direct reflection of the image the organization or agency wants to project. Perhaps not explicitly stated by the leadership, yet reinforced in the organization’s branding and internal messaging. They want to attract the freshest talent right out of school. To be so appealing that the best (read: young) minds will leave their competitors and come work there instead. When potential clients and candidates enter their offices, both the interior and the workforce need to be equally pleasing aesthetically. This may garner the attention being sought, but it is not a business strategy. Long-term survival requires more than delivering an image to the customer. Today’s flash-in-the-pan consumer cycle is faster than ever.

The success of these smaller businesses requires depth in product knowledge, industry insight and the ability to anticipate and identify the customer’s needs. This is where the groupthink trap awaits any workplace built around a single generation. They only know their collective approach to innovation, problem-solving and execution. This team misses out on decades of best practices. Decades of failure. Decades of evolution.

Original article in Business London Magazine, June 2019

The evolution of ability really is the key for seasoned technical employees. Technical skills do not vanish on an employee’s 40th birthday. Designing the latest algorithm or app does not limit you to hiring only recent graduates since math and coding came into existence long before the 21st century. For these employees, their expertise evolved over industry ups and downs and includes a situational understanding that allows them to include or exclude specific approaches based on circumstances that a younger employee may never have encountered in their career.

Best case scenario: your company takes off. You start to scale in revenue and people. Who is going to lead the organizational change?  I am not about to claim younger workers cannot be great leaders, they most certainly can be, however, a team consisting of nothing but leaders with the same level of inexperience is a disaster in the making.

In fact, the cause of many medium-sized businesses’ downfall occurs when its directors have never truly faced a challenge and cannot cope due to a lack of diversity (experience) around the table.

Identifying the potential for great leadership within the younger team members and augmenting it with experienced leaders allows for both a seasoned, strategic development plan for the company’s growth and the opportunity for less experienced leaders to be mentored when they encounter new challenges.

As for the external bias that reinforces the desire for a fresh-faced workforce, we must look to ourselves. Our creativity and innovation do not dry up the moment we reach for reading glasses and yet the business community and industries clamour to recognize companies and individuals under the age of 40. New lists seem to be created each year to capture more and more niche verticals. Should we cease to recognize these achievements?  Perhaps not, provided we do not turn a blind eye to the similarly incredible success of individuals shaking things up at any age.

No opportunity to learn is ever a wasted effort. Once we recognize the imbalance of experience on a team, overcoming our own insecurity is the biggest hurdle. Yes, the new, more seasoned employee will have the greater experience to draw on. That is precisely why you want to hire them. This learning goes both ways. The expertise they bring from decades in the industry is counter-balanced by the opportunity for them to learn the specifics of your company, your product, and your goals from the younger generation.

As with all diversity, the more viewpoints and experience your company has in its workforce, the better prepared you will be to avoid repeating mistakes by leveraging lessons learned. You also benefit from an increased ability to recognize opportunities and take action before your competition even knows an opportunity exists.