By Fiona Smith
We may be expected to live for 80
years, but we are only worth hiring for 20 of them. The rest of the time, we
are either too young or too old.
That appears to be the rule of
thumb in the job market, where people over the age of 50 take an average 73
weeks to find employment and 11.6 per cent of young people are looking for
work.
The managing director of
recruitment agency Adage, Heidi Holmes, says older workers have to be
relentlessly inventive to overcome the bias stacked against them in the job
market.
She lists five of the “extreme
job-seeking” tactics now being used by the over-’50s:
1. Buy a job
When an acquaintance, who I will
call Bob, was retrenched from a senior position in the financial services
industry, he used his savings to buy his way into a small company so that he
could install himself as CEO. It worked for a couple of years but ended
unhappily, and he was left holding equity in the company when he resigned.
Holmes says other use their
redundancy payouts to buy into a franchise, hoping that an established brand
will give them some security.
“If people are looking at buying
themselves a job, (franchising) is generally where it happens,” she says.
But if people have been unemployed
for six to 12 months, they are less likely to risk putting their savings into a
business, she says.
Buying a job is not usually an
option for young unemployed people – unless their parents are able to fund them
into it.
2. Reinvention
Cora, a journalist, knows her job
is unlikely to survive the restructuring of the industry and has spent the last
couple of years studying to become a psychologist.
Holmes says it is better to start
studying before you lose your existing job, when you have the resources to do
so.
“Mature-age people have had to
learn and adapt to change throughout their lives,” she says.
People in this age group can
present themselves as “current” and “innovative” by doing online courses, many
of which are free.
However Holmes warns that if people
study things they are interested in, rather than looking for areas of
employment demand, their study may be no use to them in the job market.
3. Working for free
Unpaid internships are commonplace
in the youth market, but older people find it difficult to get employers to let
them come in for some work experience.
Timothy Gleeson was a 38-year-old
Sydney taxi driver who had devoted all his free hours to studying accounting,
when he approached a local firm and offered to do some work for free. If they
liked him after six months, they could hire him.
The company was impressed enough to
pay him for his internship, and offered him a job six months before he had
finished university.
Holmes says people offering their
services for free should ensure there is a genuine chance of employment, rather
than an employer who is happy to exploit them.
“If you are unemployed, you are
better off showing that you are still engaged in the community in some
capacity, maybe through mentoring or volunteering,” she says.
4. Consultancy
Becoming a consultant might be the
new way of plugging an awkward gap in your resume, but Holmes says older people
can be enthusiastic entrepreneurs.
A recent article in Forbes calls them “encore entrepreneurs”: “A 2010 survey by
the Kauffman Foundation found that Americans aged 55 to 64 start new business
ventures at a higher rate than any other age group, including 20-somethings.
“Fully 23 per cent of new
entrepreneurs were aged 55 to 64, up from 14 per cent in 1996.”
Holmes says older people may have
the resources and experience to launch successful start-ups. “If a 20 year old
can bootstrap it, an older one can do it as well.”
5. Forgetting
A common tactic of older jobseekers
is to experience amnesia when it comes to declaring their qualifications and
experience.
“People think they will be too
expensive,” says Holmes, who suggests only detailing the past five to 10 years
on a resume, and tailoring it specifically for each job that is applied for.
”If you put everything down, back
to 1975, chances are the person interviewing you wasn’t even born then,” she
says.
“You have got to get to the most
important stuff very quickly. Otherwise, the good things get missed in the
noise of it all.”
6. Reality TV
Despite the fact that their
generation may have invented the internet, older job seekers still have to
prove that they understand modern uses of technology.
Holmes says the use of video in an
online resume or application can prove to a younger hiring manager that you are
not, in fact, ancient or “past it”.
“Video can overcome bias in the
recruitment process. One of the biggest biases is that older people are
reluctant to change and adapt to new technology,” says Holmes.
“When we talk about mature age, the
average age of our job seekers is 51, and they still want full-time work.”
This post originally appeared here:
http://www.brw.com.au/p/leadership/over_resort_to_extreme_job_hunting_xPX45Vao1UPNnBTzFBsVIL
This post originally appeared here:
No comments:
Post a Comment