Searching For Jobs When You’re Over 50
9 October 2006This can be one of the more difficult career problems people can face. Suppose you get fired, laid off, or for some other reason have to start a new job search - you’re getting up there in years, but you’re not ready to retire yet. The problem is that many companies don’t want you, no matter how experienced you are or how good you’d be at your job. Why hire someone when 5 or 10 years from now they’ll need to be replaced? Why hire the old fart when you’ve got younger applicants who will stick around?
Well, the Internet, which tends to produce web sites about every conceivable subject that could exist from banana collecting to extreme unicycle tricks, has something for you, too. There are web sites similar to Monster.com that are focusing entirely on people over 50 - so you know that the people posting jobs there are willing to hire you.
RetirementJobs is one of these that seems to have a lot of listings. It’s got some generic resources that can help you try to do this kind of job search - the success stories section will probably be interesting to you, but I didn’t find all that much that was useful in the other sections. I looked through the job listings and they’re kind of a mixed bag. Some of them are junky jobs they probably just can’t find anyone to fill. Others are nicer jobs, but they seemed to be mainly temporary - 6-12 months or so for many of them. That may be what you’re stuck with, but I think it would be worth filtering through the bad jobs to have a pool of employers specifically interested in older people.
Retired Brains is another site with the same purpose. This one seemed to be a little less useful in terms of the generic resources they provide (they’re geared toward retirement, not job finding, and some are kind of random). However, the searches pulled up a lot more jobs and they seemed to have fewer ”temp” jobs in the mix to sift through. Some of them were the kind of scam jobs that advertise on these sites (Sort envelopes from home for $20 an hour!) - but I’ve seen these on pretty much every job site.
I wouldn’t give up on other methods of job searching in favor of these entirely - frankly, your best shot is with your personal connections you’ve made over the years. But more options means a greater chance of finding what you want, and it’s good to be able to tell which companies are specifically interested in older workers.
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One Response to “Searching For Jobs When You’re Over 50”
November 1st, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Glad you checked out RetirementJobs.com
We only just launched the site in May but we’re getting more and more job postings as more employers see the value of hiring “old farts”
Let us know how we can make it better
Patrick Rafter (patrick@retirementjobs.com