Solving staff shortages? Hire older employees!

Stereotypes about older employees are often wrong. Here is why they actually help combat staff shortages.

Due to the aging of the labor market, the number of older employees is increasing in proportion to the number of younger employees. And for many employers, that is causing a bit of a panic.

"We need fresh perspectives! The latest knowledge! Insights into the most recent technological developments!" - is what we've been hearing lately.

Conversely, there are less optimistic ideas about older employees:

If you're old, you can't learn anything new anymore.
Older people often cling to habits and resist when younger employees try to change them.
Older people cause high absenteeism.
Older people aren't productive because they work slowly.

The belief that older people suffer from cognitive decline is particularly prevalent. This implies the assumption that older people deteriorate quickly when it comes to things like the speed at which they process information, their memory capacity, or the quality of their reasoning skills.

That is quite stereotypical and, moreover, completely untrue! Hiring older employees actually has many benefits.

Benefits of hiring older employees

Older employees are sometimes actually cognitively superior

Although it is often claimed that older employees are cognitively inferior to younger ones, there are also many cognitive functions that actually increase as you get older. Consider:

Emotional regulation
Prosocial behavior (such as how helpful you are)
Empathy and compassion
Self-reflection
Insight and conflict resolution based on experience

Plenty of reasons to want older employees on your team, then!

Moreover, it turns out that cognitive decline due to aging actually begins—hold on to your hat—at the age of thirty. Especially when it comes to skills that require effort, such as your working memory. After thirty, you increasingly rely on automatic processes, such as the knowledge and skills you have possessed for a long time. That is why many employees prefer processes they are accustomed to. But be careful what you say, because this applies not only to those over 50, but also to those over 30.

Older employees don't always cause more absenteeism

Older employees are thought to be absent more often. Lately, though, the opposite seems to be the case. It turns out that younger employees are increasingly causing absenteeism, mainly because they experience mental health problems more often. You can't have missed that burnout complaints are cropping up more and more, especially among young people, which can lead to very long periods of absence.

Old and wise

Older employees have already gained a lot of experience and knowledge over their lives. They have dealt with a wide range of problems and have worked at different organizations with different ways of working. As a result, they know how to handle many different situations!

Financially advantageous

Did you know there are a number of schemes that make it financially advantageous for you to bring older employees onto your team? These are arranged by the UWV (the Dutch employee insurance agency), the municipality, or the Tax and Customs Administration. So don't forget to take advantage of them if you choose to hire an older employee.

It's the age of diversity!

Nowadays, many organizations strive for diversity. Of course, that's not only about background, gender, or experience, but definitely about age too! As you can read in this blog, older and younger employees really do differ from each other, and each contributes something to your team in their own way. So does your company consist mainly of “young teams”? Then it can definitely be good to focus a bit more on diversity.

And so on!

How do you get the most out of those older employees?

To answer this question, we refer to the concept of the need for cognition. A wonderful concept that refers to a person's motivation to be challenged. Such a person is open to learning new skills. Learning things they don't yet know or can't yet do. Attending an online course. Stepping outside their comfort zone!

You may not immediately associate the above characteristics with older employees. As said before, they are known for wanting to keep doing what they have always done. They supposedly dread a new course like a mountain to climb and curse among themselves when they have to work with a system other than the one they're used to.

Yet this belief is also false across the board! Research shows that even employees approaching 60 can develop a higher need for cognition. The need for cognition turns out not to be linked to age, but to personality traits: openness, agreeableness, and extraversion. People who tend to be more “open” to new challenges and experiences thus have a higher need for cognition .

In other words: it's more important that we focus on retaining open, agreeable, and extraverted older employees than that we bend over backwards to lure young staff into the organization.

Furthermore, a higher need for cognition contributes to:

Happier employees - by learning new things, your employees continue to feel challenged and competent.
Less cognitive decline - that means fewer problems with memory or solution-oriented thinking!
Less absenteeism - a “busy” work environment full of growth opportunities and challenges goes hand in hand with lower blood pressure and less illness, including dementia.

A true win-win-win situation, then!

Concrete tips

Right. That said, it should be clear that hiring older staff can be very beneficial. Or taking advantage of the older employees already in your organization. And you might even want to hire retirees. Now you may be wondering: how do you make that happen?

Here are a few examples:

Offer sufficient opportunities for growth.
Set up an online academy, so every employee can learn whenever and wherever they want.
Don't underestimate older employees, but challenge them every now and then.
Recruit (potentially older) new employees and select based on the personality traits of openness, extraversion, and/or agreeableness.