The Aged Out “Consultant” Solution

I get emails from senior level candidates every week. Sometimes dozens. They usually arrive at around 9 am ET or on a Sunday evening. It is usually a super long email, replete with a elaborately crafted cover letter or links to a portfolio. It may be from someone who you met seventeen years ago or briefly worked with. Yet they enter with great familiarity and mission driven, certain that you would harken back to when you were both twenty five attending some client jolly or industry event. Many times these candidates are not even remotely connected to my industry which is basically technology and digital. Candidates in the semi-conductor industry or warehousing. Huh? Then there are those who are genuine friends, folks who you would love to help in a heartbeat but have learned the lesson many times in the past – pushing a candidate for a role that they will never get. You do this because of your of friendship and duty and heck, because you feel for the family and their breadwinner.

Welcome to the aged out “consultant,” blindsided overnight by a sudden irrelevance in their chosen field of employment, at a spry 55 years old.

Many candidates don’t realize a few things when it comes to engaging with a recruiter. First of all we can smell these emails a mile away and don't want to or cannot afford to get hooked in spending valuable time with the aged out candidates. Would we love to place you – absolutely. You provide value, experience and mentorship to any organization. Most of all you are a sticky tenured employee with use case expertise. I have friends and family members who I know are brilliant but are woefully unemployed or underemployed. As a recruiter placing candidates for a living we are driven to prioritize engagements that are close to money. The second thing most candidate cannot or don’t want to reconcile with is, for the most part recruiters work on specific requisitions that we receive from clients. They may want a SaaS Enterprise salesperson artificial intelligence or machine learning solution sales experience, or a Data Scientist with advanced statistical analysis, data mining, and data visualization techniques, to create solutions that enable enhanced business performance. Must have experience using statistical computer languages (R, Python, SLQ, etc.) to manipulate data and draw insights from large data sets. None of my friends have these skills and the unsolicited resume we receive is a non starter because as recruiters we are not paid to find jobs for people. So when a candidate emails to ask if anything came across my desk that could be a fit the answer is no. And the idea of cold calling random businesses to find you a dream job at fifty-five is tantamount to going fishing without a fishing pole and bait. Not happening..

Sadly, this problem is above my pay grade. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, older information-technology professionals are being passed over by employers, even as IT job openings soar to record highs and employers say recruiting tech talent is a challenge. The IT workforce in the U.S. skews young: Workers aged 22 to 44 account for 61% of the IT sector, but only 49% of the workforce across all occupations. A 2017 study by Visier Inc., a cloud-based analytics platform for human resources professionals, found that IT job seekers aged 34 to 51 made up 41% of the available enterprise tech talent, but only 27% of new hires. Millennials, aged 20 to 33 at the time the study was conducted, were nearly 50% more likely to land an IT job than their older counterparts, it found. The fact is hiring managers myopically identify technology innovation with youth. A recent article appearing in Marketplace announced that the tech industry has well-known diversity issues around gender and race. Age is another blind spot: 40 is the top age curve at a number of tech companies. Google just settled more than 200 claims of age discrimination, and the complaint is becoming much more common.

The median age for an American worker is 42, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the biggest tech companies, according to jobs sites and research firms, it’s more like 25 to 35.

So when us recruiter receive the unsolicited email from a friend, former colleague or stranger, remember we make money from placements – if we can place you we would. But our radar is way up when we see someone with a career starting in the 70’s or 80’s and the most recent experience is your last name or initials attached to a “Consulting” gig, the best we can do is accept is your LinkedIn invitation. We would go broke trying to convince unwilling companies to hire. There are many brave, resolute people fighting ageism, but progress is going slowly.

We know it first hand. That is why many of us have reinvented our careers as ageless recruiters or real estate agents.

My advice to the aged out consultant is to leverage 25 years of rich experience into an ebullient new career for the ages. Become a recruiter at Heads Apart Group - successful home for the aged out consultant.