Employers, stop your Sweet Young Thing obsession

According to Workday, Singapore employees have the highest expected turnover rate in the Asia Pacific, with 46% likely to leave their jobs within a year.

With that, many find it a big challenge in building their workforce.

Concurrently, Singapore has one of the most rapidly ageing populations globally, translating into an increasingly ageing workforce.?

In 2020, the labour force participation rate of Singapore residents aged 65 years and above was at 30.1 per cent, which is expected to increase.

Despite the more significant number of senior workers, it does not seem that hiring companies are keen to consider them. The unemployment rate among those workers is relatively higher than in the younger age groups.

It went up for people in their 60s and above in Dec 2021 compared to a year ago.

A survey by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) also found that in cases of reported discrimination, the top reason was that it was because they were older.

I want someone young and aggressive.

I don't have the official statistics to back this, but having serviced hundreds of clients on their recruitment in my previous career, we always begin by knowing precisely what they want.

In my decade of correspondences, they would always reply, "I want someone young and aggressive, ideally between ages of x to y."

There had never been a scenario where the HR or hiring manager would tell us that they want someone in their late fifties to mentor their younger workers, composed and full of life experiences.?Never.

Google about the management of Gen Z, and you are looking at more than 11 million hits. But unfortunately, many managers struggle to understand them, let alone manage them.

The list of complaints is long – spoiled, lazy, poor work ethic, little respect for authority, self-centred, unrealistic expectations, etc.

Even though Singapore's Tripartite Alliance for Fair & Progressive Employment Practices (TAFEP for short) has a guideline on age discrimination (and it was embedded into legislation around Sep 2013), many employers still insist on the "young and aggressive".

They simply stop listing these qualifiers on their job advertisements and internalise them into their processes so they won't be public.

To those employers, I got news for you – our population is shrinking fast. But, on the other hand, our economy is growing much quicker than we can grow our babies. The discrepancy is enormous.

Many employers fight for the same pool of young workers with better perks, fancier titles, and bigger pantries. So that they can probably hold down their new hire for a year… before they job-hop to somewhere else.

When you have an unwritten rule of hiring just the young and aggressive, you get the diluted talent that everyone else has picked through.

Think about it – the cream of the crop would have gotten a job even before graduation.

The next echelon would be hankering for the sexy companies in the market (e.g. investment banks, tech giants).

The balance is your only target pool. What are the chances of getting a Star Performer from that sample size?

But older employees are slow.

According to a brief on "Older Workers in the Workplace" by the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, older workers can be as productive as younger ones.

The findings are based on BMW implementing 70 changes along its assembly line to accommodate older workers.

As quick as the initial year, BMW experienced a 7 per cent increase in productivity.

This is comparable to other assembly lines where younger workers man.

Furthermore, the company reported zero defects and a reduction in absenteeism from 7 per cent to 2 per cent.

Although older workers may be weaker and less agile, they hardly make any severe errors since they possess more experience.

The cost of the wrong hire is too devastating.

By narrowing your hiring decisions to smaller demographics, you are encouraging the possibility of a wrong hire since you have lesser options to consider.

And the cost of a wrong hiring decision isn't just limited to direct costs such as:

• Recruiting Fees
• Background Checks
• Employee Referral Incentives / Fees
• Hiring Manager's time and expenses
• Travel expenses
• Base Salary
• Benefits
• Vacation/Time off
• Legal Costs
• Outplacement Costs
• HR department time and expenses

You would also have to consider indirect costs such as lower personal productivity among dissatisfied employees, disruptions caused by disgruntled employees, higher turnover rates among productive employees, damages to reputation and market share, lost management time, increased stress and anxiety from people problems, poor employee morale and lost business opportunities.

Multiply this with the number of new hires that last barely a few months because they had "learned everything" or feel "something better's come along".

Recruitment suddenly became a core business focus when it shouldn't be.

A 60-year-old will outlast your typical job-hopper

Older workers also provide the consistency that business requires to plan a bit further into the future.

Their presenteeism and productivity are among the highest. They also bring substantial experience and resilience built from years of employment that their younger peers may be less likely to possess.

Even if that 60-year-old worker only has ten years of contribution left, he will transcend at least 3 of his 30-year-old peers. How is that for consistency!

Time to re-think hiring policies

Gen Z is skewing the definition of work-life balance to the extreme edge of "life" instead of "work".

They need time to build up their leadership skills, lose focus so quickly, and their loyalty and job ethics remain questionable.

Older workers are more than up to the job, and they bring unique skills and expertise that few can offer.

Discriminating against them is just discriminating against the entire organisation's bottom line.

Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam chided HRs in 2015 for being agents of a "quiet, unstated discrimination" against mid-career and older workers and should aim to do the "right and fair thing".

Unless your company is anti-profit, the recruiting department must educate hiring managers on the issue of age bias that relates to hiring decisions.

It is your job to contest the status quo and consider all competent workers for your open positions — not just the young ones.

Nobody succeeds when a position sits open, waiting endlessly for a younger candidate.