Across the UK organisations are struggling to hire the people they need. Meanwhile, experienced people with decades of knowledge, strong track records and plenty more to contribute are struggling to find work. What gives?
We spoke to Lucy Andrews, Director of Elevating50, about the barriers facing experienced candidates, and what employers can do to attract and recruit them.
Keep reading to learn:
- Why “future talent” shouldn’t simply mean young talent
- How age bias could be shrinking your available talent pool
- Why employers value experience in theory but penalise it in practice
- Where hidden age bias can enter your recruitment process
- Five questions to test whether experienced candidates get a fair chance
Are you looking for future skills in the wrong places?
The Open University’s 2026 Business Barometer reports that 57% of UK business leaders say they’re facing skills shortages – up from 54% last year. Of those, 42% expect shortages to worsen.
So where will the skills employers need come from?
There’s much attention on early careers pipelines – both the importance of, and AI’s impact on. (The same Open University study finds that 19% of UK employers are decreasing entry-level hiring, which 42% say is because of AI.)
For sure, that’s a big issue coming down the track. Fewer entry-level opportunities mean fewer places for people to learn, develop and grow into the experienced talent employers need tomorrow.
But ‘future talent’ shouldn’t just be a byword for ‘young talent’.
People over 50 already comprise nearly a third of the UK workforce. And over half a million economically inactive people aged 50 to 65 say they’d like to work. Many have years, potentially decades, of working life ahead of them.
But employment rates of people aged 50 to 65 lag behind those aged 35 to 49 in every region across England, sometimes by almost twenty percentage points.
That’s a big deal for employers trying to build a sustainable workforce – and for the people being left behind.
Because a job is never just a job. It’s income, independence, connection, confidence, structure and purpose. Uninterrogated age bias can put all of that out of reach.
Of course, not every experienced candidate will have the skills you need. But can recruiters credibly call talent scarce when you might be overlooking, discouraging or filtering out a significant chunk of the available workforce?
Welcome to the experience paradox
That question sits at the heart of Neil’s recent conversation with Lucy Andrews, Director of Elevating50, on The View.
Lucy established Elevating50 after watching the same pattern unfold across her network. Experienced, highly capable people from different industries were made redundant or completed interim assignments, then struggled to get back into work.
They came to Lucy, with her background in talent acquisition, asking what they were doing wrong. Was it their CV? Was the ATS rejecting them? How could they get through the system?
Often, Lucy couldn’t see anything wrong with what they were doing.
That exposes a contradiction. Organisations say they need people who can exercise judgement, manage complexity, resolve conflict, build trusted relationships and start delivering quickly. But the career history which enables people to develop those qualities is treated as a liability.
- A long CV is ‘over-qualified’
- A senior job title creates assumptions about salary
- Older qualifications are discounted
- A nonlinear career looks riskier than a conventional trajectory
Experience is prized in theory but penalised in practice. And it’s still a big blind spot for many teams.
Age remains a recruitment blind spot
Tribepad’s own Stop the Bias research suggests age isn’t receiving enough attention from recruiters proportionate to the concern candidates feel.
When we asked recruiters where they were concentrating their diversity and inclusion efforts, gender, ethnicity and disability dominated. But when we asked candidates about the discrimination they had experienced or feared, age was their biggest concern.
We’re not saying employers should divert attention from other forms of inequality. But it means age remains a chunky, and comparatively overlooked, part of inclusive recruitment.
Discrimination doesn’t begin neatly on someone’s 50th birthday, either. (Here’s your cake: blow your candles out and make a wish for career continuity 🎉).
Candidates can encounter assumptions about being “too old” much earlier, just as younger candidates can be dismissed as inexperienced or unreliable.
It leaves us with a narrow window in which candidates are considered neither too young nor too old. And outside it, age often does the talking before ability gets the chance. Sounds like bias to us.
Where age bias hides
No organisations deliberately instruct recruiters or recruitment technology to reject older candidates (we hope!). The whole reason bias is such an insidious problem is that it’s often nearly invisible; the cumulative impact from a heap of small choices that add up.
Like:
- Careers pages filled exclusively with young faces
- “Digital native”, “high-energy” or “young and dynamic” language
- Mandatory dates for qualifications
- Arbitrary limits on years of experience
- Career gaps treated as evidence of declining relevance
- Candidates dismissed as “overqualified” without a conversation
- Screening criteria that disproportionately reward conventional career paths
- Assumptions about salary, ambition, adaptability or retirement plans
AI and automation raise the stakes further. Recruitment software scales the hiring process and candidate experience you design – which means it can make fair, relevant decisions more consistent but it can also apply questionable assumptions to more people, more quickly.
You might’ve caught Stacey Duguid’s story, which made major waves recently. Stacey shared her journey from hugely experienced and accomplished fashion editor to ‘unemployable’; ghosted by hundreds of applications.
Stacy’s experience – and the wave of support from thousands of women experiencing similar – has sparked the conversation about the role of AI recruitment tools in creating and accelerating invisible age discrimination.
Hence the huge AI trust gap.
This is one great reason we’re extremely bullish about transparent, ethical AI use. Tribepad is the first ATS to be Warden AI Assured, so teams can trust their recruitment software is fair and inclusive.
As Lucy and Neil discuss, recruitment tech should remove repetitive work and give recruiters more time to speak with candidates. It absolutely shouldn’t reduce recruitment to an automatic workflow where efficiency replaces human judgement.
The benefit might be speed. The downside is a workforce decimated by a technology we should’ve taken better control over.
Stop recruiting by proxy
The answer isn’t hire someone just because they’re over 50, or to replace negative stereotypes with flattering ones.
Older candidates aren’t automatically more loyal, resilient or commercially astute. Nor are they automatically expensive, technologically behind, inflexible or winding down to retirement.
Damaging stereotypes are damaging stereotypes, whichever side of the coin. If you care about building a fair, inclusive process, you need candidate assessment strategies that assess actual skills; not proxies for that skill.
If adaptability matters, assess adaptability. If current technical knowledge matters, test that knowledge. Or develop a strategy to train that knowledge. If the role has a certain salary range, publish it – don’t just assume older candidates won’t be interested.
Five question age bias audit
If you want to build a fairer, more inclusive hiring process – and tap into a deeper, often underused, and extremely skilled talent pool while you’re at it – ask these five questions.
1. Who sees – and feels seen by – our opportunities?
Review your sourcing channels, careers imagery and job-ad language. Do they represent a genuinely multigenerational workforce?
2. Are we using candidate information for the right reasons?
Collect what’s necessary for compliance and safer recruitment, but don’t let dates, gaps or career length become proxies for capability, motivation and suitability.
3. What do our screening rules assume?
Inspect knockout questions, experience bands, employment-gap rules and definitions of ‘recent’ experience. Make sure every reason for excluding someone is relevant to the job.
4. Where could subjective judgement be creeping in?
Structure interviews and score candidates consistently. Interrogate labels like “overqualified” and “culture fit”.
5. Who disappears from our recruitment funnel—and where?
Measure progression by age across application, shortlist, interview, offer and hire. A diverse applicant pool means little if one group consistently disappears at the same stage.
Can you afford to overlook one of the largest talent pools out there?
Older candidates won’t solve every skills shortage, and of course early-career recruitment and development are critical too.
But in an ageing population, you can’t build tomorrow’s workforce by concentrating on one end of the age spectrum while talent drops off a cliff at the other. It just doesn’t work.
Before deciding that the skills aren’t available, make sure your recruitment process is reliably surfacing and fairly assessing the people who might have them.
Watch Neil’s full conversation with Lucy Andrews, Director of Elevating50, for more on attracting, recruiting and retaining experienced talent.
Tribepad is the trusted tech ally to smart(er) recruiters everywhere. Combining ATS, CRM, assessment, video screening, compliance, onboarding, analytics and a fully-integrated AI assistant, our talent acquisition software is a springboard for fairer, faster, better recruitment for everyone.
B-Corp certified and multiple-award-winning (like Best ATS for Enterprises and Tech Company of the Year), Tribepad is trusted by organisations like Hotel Chocolat, Greggs, Tesco, Subway, DFS, Met Office, and Home Bargains.
Age bias in recruitment: FAQs
What is age bias in recruitment?
Age bias in recruitment happens when a candidate’s perceived age influences how their skills, experience, potential or suitability are judged. It can disadvantage older and younger candidates, even when age is never explicitly mentioned during the hiring process.
What are some examples of age bias in recruitment?
Examples include using age-coded language such as “digital native”, making assumptions about salary or ambition based on career length, dismissing experienced candidates as “overqualified”, penalising employment gaps and treating older qualifications as evidence that someone’s skills are outdated.
How can age bias affect recruitment?
Age bias can unnecessarily narrow an employer’s talent pool, prevent capable candidates from progressing and reinforce workforce skills shortages. It can also damage candidate trust, employer brand and workforce diversity.
How can employers reduce age bias when hiring?
Employers can reduce age bias by using inclusive job adverts, assessing candidates against consistent job-related criteria, structuring interviews, reviewing knockout questions and measuring candidate progression by age. Hiring teams should also challenge assumptions about experience, career gaps, salary expectations and adaptability.
Should employers remove dates and employment histories from applications?
Only where those details aren’t needed. Some regulated sectors require employers to collect full employment histories, qualification information and explanations for gaps. The priority is to collect information for legitimate reasons and prevent dates, gaps or career length from becoming irrelevant proxies for capability.
Can recruitment technology create age bias?
Recruitment technology can reproduce age bias if inappropriate criteria, historical patterns or proxy information influence screening and scoring. Technology can also help reduce bias by creating more consistent processes, supporting structured assessment and showing where different groups leave the recruitment funnel.
How can employers check their recruitment process for age bias?
Review who applies, who progresses and who is hired across different age groups. If candidates from one group consistently disappear at the same stage, investigate the language, criteria, technology and human decisions involved at that point.
Is age a protected characteristic in UK recruitment?
Yes. Age is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010. Employers must not unlawfully discriminate against candidates because of their age during advertising, application, selection, interview or appointment.
