Viewpoint: Employers' attitude is putting off the over-50s

It seems the over-fifties are willing to work but they’re discouraged by the perceived attitude of their potential employers, says Dawn Browne

The hospitality sector is still struggling to recruit enough staff. Data from the British Chambers of Commerce issued in October 2023 showed that hospitality firms were still the most likely to suffer than any other sector, with 79% of firms reporting hiring challenges. At the same time, unemployment levels are rising. In July to September 2023 there were 1.4 million unemployed people in the UK and more than 300,000 of them are aged 50-plus – a figure that is rising steeply, particularly in the 65-plus age category.

I work for pub group Fuller’s and we’re passionate about inclusivity, and hiring an age-inclusive workforce has been a core focus for the past two years. We have made business decisions to attract older workers and are working with organisations such as Rest Less, a digital community for the over-50s in the UK with nearly 1.2 million members, to recruit from this demographic.

We have also changed the imagery in our job posts to more accurately reflect age diversity and we consistently showcase older worker case studies internally, which means that all of our teams understand the benefits of having multiple generations working together and people of all ages feel welcome in the business. Our actions are having an impact – in 2023, we saw a threefold increase in job applications from people aged 50-plus compared with 2021.

 

“We urge our peers to consider how they are reaching people in their fifties and sixties and how they are representing them in their advertising”

In order to understand more about the perceptions of older workers towards employment in the hospitality sector, we ran a survey with Rest Less. The results were insightful but made for depressing reading and provide our industry with some much-needed learnings.

The encouraging news is that more than two-thirds of the 1,000 respondents aged 50 and older said they would consider applying for a role in hospitality. However, 88% also thought the hospitality sector prefers hiring young people. Just 9% said they thought there were lots of opportunities for older workers to retrain in our sector compared with 52% of those who thought there were opportunities but they were hard to come by. And 39% said they didn’t think retraining opportunities were available for older workers.

With an aging UK society and workforce, our sector has a huge job on its hands to revamp its reputation as being an age-inclusive place to work and a sector of choice for workers of all ages. We have one core part of the offering – shift work and flexible working patterns are a perfect match for people who cannot or do not want to commit to a nine-to-five role, which is often the case for people in their fifties and sixties who are juggling a range of different life responsibilities. However, there seems to be a gap between understanding and delivering on the broader employee proposition for this demographic.

When asked if they thought hospitality firms offered employee perk packages that are relevant to people in their fifties and older, only 5% said yes, 69% said they didn’t know and the rest simply said no.

I don’t for a second believe that anyone in our sector is deliberately excluding older workers from the hiring process, but very few organisations are actively welcoming this demographic. We urge our peers to consider how they are reaching people in their fifties and sixties and how they are representing them in their advertising. These are fantastic first steps which are sure to make a difference. With one-third of the UK’s workforce aged over 50, there is a huge opportunity for our sector to benefit from this exciting yet under-represented talent pool.

Dawn Browne is people and talent director at Fuller, Smith & Turner