Recruiters ignore 50+ candidates at their peril
Organisations that ignore or reject qualified candidates who are older than 50 do so at their peril.
This was the warning given by the founder and CEO of anti-ageism advocacy organisation 55/Redefined to an audience of talent acquisition specialists on Tuesday [25 March 2025].
Speaking at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect event in London, Lyndsey Simpson reeled off numerous statistics that revealed advantages of fighting the stereotypes and hiring people who will stay at their jobs longer, bring experience to the workplace, contribute to a more collaborative operation and support an “ageless hiring and talent development strategy”.
“If you don’t have an age strategy, you don’t have a growth strategy,” Simpson said.
Further, Simpson said, more than 90% of workers older than 50 say they would like to stay in the workforce, and reskill and retrain, with 89% willing to take pay cuts to reskill. “Twenty-five per cent,” she said, “never want to retire.”
Yet 82% of over 50s report that they have not been contacted by a recruiter in 12 months.
An ageless mindset promotes individuals’ well-being, even in younger populations, Simpson said. She cited research that discovered people increase their life expectancy by 7.5 years by dismissing ageist thinking around supposed age-determinant capabilities of their own and others.
On an even more practical level, Simpson pointed out, the percentage of Millennials who will reach the age of 50 or above by 2030 make age discrimination a clear threat to organisations trying to staff their businesses. “Forty-seven per cent of the UK workforce will be aged over 50 by 2030,” she said.
Elsewhere in the world, over 12% of Hong Kong’s workforce is over 50, Simpson said. Insurance company AXA’s workforce is aged 17-83 years old, she added. And the older workforce is making its mark on the workforce, as demonstrated recently at the ecological transformation services company Veolia, she said. Its operator of the year, meaning a frontline worker who does highly physical work, was 74 years old.
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