Good Recruitment for Older Workers (GROW)

Minimising age-bias in recruitment is an essential part of being an age-friendly employer.

Unfortunately, more than a third (36%) of 50-69 year olds feel at a disadvantage applying for jobs due to their age. Our previous research found that age is the least scrutinised and most widely accepted form of discrimination in the UK.

Too many older applicants are frozen out of the job market due to inadequate processes, age-bias and a lack of engagement from employers and recruiters. This ultimately disadvantages employers who fail to draw on the experience and abilities of a significant talent pool.

How we think about the job market needs to change so that age is no longer a barrier to people finding jobs, or employers finding people.

The job market is going through dramatic changes with the impact of COVID-19, new technology and Brexit, making this research more timely than ever.

We've commissioned three research projects to build the evidence base:

• The current and future recruitment landscape for older workers – delivered by the Institute for Employment Studies
• Older workers’ own experience of recruitment -  being delivered by Demos and the National Institute for Economic and Social Research (NIESR)
• An experiment to explore what impact the choice of language used in recruitment materials have on older workers, and the prevalence of those terms - being delivered by the Behavioural Insights Team

You can read all of the findings from those pieces of work below. We plan to use the findings to feed into a second phase working directly with employers and recruiters to design, develop and test new approaches.