As a 57-year-old in the IT sector I can easily relate to this. I have clients in their 80s who occasionally ring me up asking me how to do things of a technical nature, but rarely to ask me how to write an email, prepare a report, access and manipulator spreadsheet or provide details of their online behaviours.

One of the issues that many employers have grasped is that the employers themselves are in their 50s and 60s and utilise the services of recruitment agencies who on average employee under 30-year-olds, frequently with no background in recruiting nor any real qualifications for the job. Occasionally I have seen recruiters who have a marketing background but I've never seen one that had an HR background, and frequently I have seen them with no university background at all, rather they were just skilled salespeople.

If one contemplates the nature of the recruitment industry, one has to take into account the drive to succeed as a recruiter. It is not to keep a full book of appropriate employees available for a prospective employer, rather, it is to get as many employers as possible on the ones books who depend on the recruiter to fulfil the recruiting needs.

This is all very well in a time of market positivity, but as soon as people start being made redundant the whole process changes and in fact the first people to be made redundant are often the recruiters themselves. They do not appear to learn from their own experience however because as soon as they become the clients of other recruiters they realise just how few skills they have for the workplace outside of sales and it becomes a fairly long drop for them on 100,000 a year as a recruiter to find themselves trying to sell products or services outside of the recruiting industry which in a downturned economy are not wanted.

What most employers fail to understand, is that the biggest part of a recruiter's job is going through emails looking for appropriate skill sets when the recruiters themselves neither understand the job nor the skill sets required to successfully do it. Under most circumstances, an employer could put a junior employee onto the job of going through those emails looking for keywords utilised by applicants which are appropriate to the job description, and make a pretty fair job, with a little bit of experience, of shortlisting half a dozen for the employer to meet. Under those circumstances, unless the employer included age as one of the keys, the employer would see people who had not only all the skills involved in doing the job but also far more experience appropriate to the position. The employer could then spend an afternoon meeting with both six and in general be able to meet one who they felt would fit the bill.

When one considers the cost of using a recruiter, the saving in having someone in one's own office going through the applications and then the employer themselves would have a bit of a view of whether they can get on with the incoming employee and whether they could do the job. In general it has been found that older employees make better employees simply because they don't really enjoy the process of going from job to job every year, but would rather settle into a single position and stay there far longer.

A 20 something coming through a recruiting agency can reasonably expected to stay more than three months, which is the guarantee usually given by the recruiting agency to refill the position, usually with the second or third tier applicant. If one was to think more in line with recruiting an older person then the recruiting process is only gone through every few years.

Whilst this is an economical argument, it actually make better business sense as well, due to the reduction in training usually required by an older person whose main interest in getting the job is staying there, rather than the younger 20 something who sees the position as a stepping stone to the next job.

In my much younger days I worked for a recruiter in Sydney whose main aim each week was not so much to put the right person into the job so much as to get a $15,000 ad on the front page of the jobs section of the Sydney morning Herald, with their name all over it thereby getting advertising at no cost to themselves and increasing their client list rather than improving their clients opportunities to get the right person. That job was most definitely about sales of advertising, rather than having as its raison d'être filling jobs appropriately, quickly and permanently.

While a few have been messing around in the insurance and super space, the real fight has always been with the recruiters. Daemon is right. They have shown scant regard for changing their ways - and why should they as the Government has done NO media or promotion in its older job seeker programs. Don't worry about the media - go straight at Hays, Hudson's etc.

...And, of course not forgetting the loyalty and dedication to the “job” age will bring, with added advantages of stability of temperament and stamina born of experience, aimed at the “job-in-hand”; not the weekend “piss-up” to come.

Perhaps there should be an 'older employee' reporting system for businesses similar to the one that is/was in place for reporting on female employees. I think it was voluntary, but just having it focussed attention on the issue.

I used to think that all those fit and happy oldies in the superannuation and funeral insurance ads were projecting a good image til I realised that they were, of course, all shown as being out of the workforce

That's one of the things that bugs me about the 457 visas - no requirement to even try and fill vacancies locally, while there is a pool of unemployed experienced older workers not to mention huge number of underemployed people as well as young job-starters who are perpetually messed around with irregular casual hours and short term part-time contracts (if they are lucky enough to find any sort of work).

in the mid 80s when I was in my mid 40s and desperately looking for work in Adelaide, someone's timely advice got me to the office of D.O.M.E
(Don't Overlook Mature Expertise) which is a self-help agency run on a shoestring and they helped me get two excellent casual jobs for a few weeks, just the sort of thing I had been looking for.

I believe they're still operating, and no better value for time and money can be had by any older unemployed person than by looking them up.
They have the runs on the board.

I'm afraid I have to disagree with you Shrode. A client of mine registered with DOME early last year and they have produced nothing. She said they were 'analogue', out of touch and had very few jobs on offer. The two standout jobs boards in Australia are Adage and Older Workers. I hear WOW for advice is exceptionally good. DOME? Shocker.