New study finds older workers 25 times less likely to get a job interview

Study finds older workers up to 25 times less likely to be offered a job interview than younger counterparts.

Women over 50 are up to 25 times less likely to be offered a job interview than their counterparts in their late 20s, new research on age discrimination shows.

A job application experiment exposed dramatic differences between the chances of older and younger workers getting past the first hurdle even when they had the same level of qualifications and more experience.

The disparity was even more marked among women than men.

Researchers at Anglia Ruskin University’s Lord Ashcroft International Business School applied for more than 1,800 jobs over a period of almost two years using a series of carefully constructed CVs.

They included applicants aged 28 and 50 with otherwise almost identical skills and interests.

Overall the younger candidate s were 4.2 times more likely to be offered an interview. Younger men were 3.6 times more likely to get an interview than their older rivals while among women the gap was 5.3 times.

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The most dramatic difference could be seen in applications for the factory jobs where the 50-year-old female applicants were 25 times less likely to be offered an interview than the younger women.

The number of over 50s in the workplace rose by 10 per cent in the last four years to nine million, recent official figures showed.

The study, led by Dr Nick Drydakis, an economist at Anglia Ruskin University, was commissioned by the official magazine of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

“Our study suggests that work is becoming less age-friendly, not more, and that older people have to spend more time and effort than younger people to obtain an interview,” said Dr Drydakis.

“Unfortunately workforce ageing is still often viewed negatively by those working in HR, who focus on difficulties and conflicts instead of potentials and opportunities.

“Those involved in recruiting need to be trained to carry out age-sensitive selection processes, and the Government should require firms to have ‘ageing at work’ policies.

“With an ageing population and the official retirement age creeping upwards, this is an issue that needs to be tackled.

“Simply encouraging older people to re-enter the labour force may not guarantee that they will be able to find jobs in a timely manner, if at all.”

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