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Understanding the motivations of laid-off workers who are looking for new roles may shape your company’s recruitment strategy.
It is, so the word on the street goes, hard finding a white collar job nowadays — particularly if you’re Gen-Z or a man, and experts say AI is partly to blame. But a new report shines a light on the job-finding challenges faced by a different group of people: older workers who have lost their jobs later in life. In particular, the report details the barriers this group faces in finding new work — some of which are self-imposed, while others reflect bigger issues in society. The main issue? The inability of people to relocate to where the jobs are.
There are lessons here for your company, if you’re trying to recruit an older person to bring specialist expertise and wisdom to your workplace.
The main issue faced by workers seeking white collar jobs, Fortune contends, is that we’re living in an era when remote work norms are being eroded by managers who are keen to micromanage their staffs in person — despite all evidence that hybrid work is just as, if not more, efficient. Return-to-office mandates are expanding, and this means working in a new job in a new region may not be as simple as logging into a new Slack channel or opening a Zoom call. Companies are increasingly investing in employee relocations, Fortune says, citing the latest survey results from moving-and-packing firm Atlas. Fortune says that while Gen-Z workers are more open to relocating to match a job’s requirements, job mobility for people over 50 can get tied up with life goals and situations.
The biggest barrier for an older worker to relocate for a potential new job is family ties. Older workers can be “anchored in place,” Fortune says, because of commitments to adult children, their grandchildren, or other commitments to aging siblings or parents. Equally, an older person may have a spouse who is reluctant to move for similar family reasons, or because their job suits their location and habits.
The second biggest reason for older workers refusing to relocate relates to the dire state of the housing market. Either because of unfavorable mortgage rates right now or the earlier effects of the financial crash or property devaluations, older workers may find it all but financially impossible to relocate to land a new job. They also may have lived in their property for a while, and letting the feelings of attachment go can be a difficult challenge.
Last, but not least, older workers may be battling the psychological scars of a world of work that has been upended several times over recent decades, smashing the notions that older white collar workers had that they would experience continuous employment once they graduated college. But that old notion of companies being loyal to their workers has gone, and age and experience no longer guarantee a worker a permanent seat at a desk.
The people surveyed in the Fortune report were from Minnesota, and they were interviewed by Fortune to discover commonalities in their job-seeking experience. But the fact they’re from one particular state doesn’t prevent their responses from being more generally descriptive of what people from other states experience as well.
And essentially it boils down to this: if your recruitment process doesn’t make accommodations for the layered needs of older potential employees, you run the risk of missing out on recruiting some excellent talent — people who have long-term expertise, and perhaps a more traditionally strong work ethic. Older workers also help create a more diverse workplace — and diversity has been linked to better efficiency and thus higher profitability.
Given that some job market sectors are seeing labor shortages, ignoring the needs of one group — older workers who may need specific perks to tempt them to move — means you’re potentially missing out on hiring just the right people you need to augment your team.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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