Ageism is dumb

Ageism is dumb and it hurts companies.

What it is said to mean is "this person has more experience than the role requires and will therefore be bored and leave quickly."

What it usually means, is: "this person is older than we imagined for this role and we don't know what to do about that"

Let's also dismantle the "they'll be bored and leave" logic real quick:

1. Younger employees leave all the time too.

   
   

2. A lot of older candidates applying for "lower" roles have genuinely decided they WANT that scope of work. They're allowed to do that. Some people want to be excellent individual contributors and not manage anyone ever again, and that is FINE.

   
   

3. Even if their tenure is shorter, experienced employees often onboard faster, make fewer costly mistakes, and need less hand-holding to get the job done right.

   
   

4. Leaving because they're bored assumes that the only thing keeping any employee engaged is the difficulty of their tasks. If that's the only thing going for a role, and not the culture, colleagues, stability, flexibility, benefits, commute (or lack thereof), or respect from coworkers, that sounds like a problem with the company, not with the candidate.

Here's what companies are actively LEAVING ON THE TABLE by not hiring older employees:

• Institutional knowledge

• Mentorship capacity

• The ability to recognize a bad idea because they watched a nearly identical bad idea fail before

• The steadiness of someone who has already survived three rounds of layoffs and a pivot and a rebrand and does not spiral when Q3 looks uncertain

That is valuable!

Hire the experienced person and let them be "overqualified" so your company can benefit from their expertise.