In this article I want to talk about common prejudices, according to which age-related restrictions arise in companies when selecting personnel using the example of the professional field “Information Technologies”.
Personally, I do not agree with the rejection of candidates because of the “adult” age, not only because it is illegal. In most cases, it is simply devoid of common sense and unreasonably complicates the task of selection.
1. We have a young team and we will not work together with people older than us
Perhaps this is the most common answer to the question of a recruiter to the head - why do you limit the age of candidates?
Such reasons are often called:
- difficulty in communication (professional and personal) between age groups;
- experienced and mature people are less flexible, often stubbornly insist on their own, it is more difficult to negotiate with them (or rather, persuade them to follow instructions with which they do not agree);
- it is more difficult to observe subordination when the subordinate is noticeably older than the head.
Young companies are recruiting young developers / specialists into teams, claiming that they will not be able to work together with the older generation. I suspect that such an opinion is formed due to not very positive experience in communicating with the older generation - with parents, teachers, etc. That is, in social systems, where a young person is often placed in a subordinate position. Then, having become a leader, such a person does not want to once again feel discomfort from unpleasant memories.
A person is a social being, and it is expected that he is able to adapt to various conditions, including communicating with people of different ages. If you always strive for comfort, then there will be less reason and opportunity to develop social and communication skills. If the manager avoids communicating with more experienced and subordinate people, then, in my opinion, this looks strange, or even suspicious.
Moreover, if you ask an experienced age specialist whether he will be comfortable working in a young team, he usually will not have any difficulties or prejudices about this. Perhaps it is a matter of developed communicative abilities, the ability to negotiate, argue one’s position and choose effective methods for making decisions within a team.
Thus, difficulties often arise among young people because of their own inexperience and, sometimes, the fear of being caught by incompetence. The inflexibility of senior comrades is often explained by a responsible attitude to the results of work. Subordination is easily established, you just need to master this skill.
If you rely on the experience of past decades, it was decided to form teams of mixed ages. More experienced colleagues provided professional expertise, shared experiences with young people, and young ones contributed creativity.
2. Specialists older than 40 are no longer striving for professional development
Those who hold this opinion often call such reasons:
- decrease in physical and intellectual activity;
- there is no desire to receive new knowledge, since they already know everything that is needed;
- when looking for a job, they seek to find a place where you can sit until retirement.
By the way, such prejudice is also widespread in Russia that a worthy person must certainly become a leader with age. If by the age of 45 you have not become a boss, then you are a loser and incapable of complex, responsible work. A person is able to develop at any age. The problem is that most people really don’t need to learn something new, so the habit of learning becomes dull with age. It is also worth considering that experienced people more balancedly evaluate new technologies and try to link them with their experience. The older the specialist, the more he saw once-fashionable technologies that never met the expectations and efforts put into them. Therefore, the interest to rush energetically to learn new things decreases with age - this is natural and useful.
In engineering, including IT, it is possible to successfully learn and develop horizontally. That is, to become a very competent specialist, not a boss. Therefore, it is worth learning to determine who is in front of you - an age lazy person or an experienced specialist with deep knowledge. It is important to understand what tasks you set for the specialist. Does he need to make an effort to solve them? Does he need to find best practices? But the main question is - can he solve current problems? Is it really important for you that the employee quickly master fundamentally new knowledge?
It is also worth remembering that the conditions for professional development of an employee are created by the employer. If it is important for you that employees develop, then what do you do for this, what conditions do you create?
3. Specialists of the older generation refuse to work after school
If you look at this situation honestly and frankly, then we all understand that regular processing is a consequence of poor-quality or dishonest management. Companies with well-established processing workflows are rare and due to emergencies. Selecting people according to the principle of “how they act in a rare and emergency situation” is not a very healthy idea. If you have a certain schedule affecting weekends and holidays, evening time, then you simply honestly declare this to future employees. By agreeing to work with you, they accept these conditions and then their work on weekends is not extracurricular. If you suddenly inform the team that you now have a 6-day work week and a 10-hour work day, then you should not blame an adult who has learned to find a balance between work and personal life.
When a person is over 45 years old, many already have families, and some even have grandchildren. In addition to working in their lives, there are many interesting things. Are specialists ready to urgently arrive at the workplace at the call of the employer in case of emergency? Are you ready to leave your family and go to work in a critical situation? Usually yes. Because, they are more inclined to long-term relations with the employer, and are no longer ready to jump from place to place.
I repeat once again that work without emergency situations is a sign of the organization’s management skill. If such situations are possible, then it makes sense to create schedules for specialists on duty, emergency response teams from those that are sometimes ready to process and be able to smooth out the severity of situations, reducing the emergency to a regular, working one.
All the “reasons” for refusal to age candidates described above are “mental restraints” for companies that significantly narrow the pool of highly qualified candidates available for employment.