I started on this via this interview with Tom Peters:
What’s the definition of a millennial? A human being who has no money. What is the definition of old people? The people who have the money. My throwaway line is, “My people” – meaning old people – “my people don’t have the money. We have all the money.” And the amount of effort and attention that goes into marketing and product development for the over-50s is pathetically low.
Fucking a, Tom Peters! How sick a burn are those first two lines? DAMN!!!
OK, but seriously, this is true.
A 63 year-old tends to have more money than a 23 year-old. Just saying. They can buy stuff and make more decisions.
But we’re fucking obsessed with millennials, even if most everything we think about them is actually inaccurate.
What gives?
Youth is revered, age is not
That’s just a thing. People believe it. Youth are strong and virile and “the next generation.” Old people on the way out. Shouldn’t necessarily be how we think, but it is. Tad Friend hit the cover off the ball in a New Yorker article on ageism a few months back, basically arguing that Silicon Valley is making it worse. Now we deify the 22 year-old startup founder, not the 65 year-old who’s been growing profits for decades. Ya know? It’s stupid.
The paradox of how we hire
We hire almost entirely for pre-existing competence, i.e. bullet points of what you can do/the skills you have. We barely ever address if you can communicate, if you’re a total fucking asshole, etc, etc. Those things get left in the trash heap. I want to know where you have this coding language or you’ve used MailChimp. Got it.
Well, competence around skills tends to come with age. A 30 year-old who’s been using Pardot for eight years is better at it than a 22 year-old.
But companies love this “young tech talent” stuff.
Dirty little secret: what it actually means is “We can pay them less, right? Because they have less experience?”
Right. That’s what it means.
Think of another way companies leave money on the table
From that same Peters interview:
Women buy virtually everything – 80% of consumer goods. Over 50% of commercial goods. [Yet] most organizations still are at the level – particularly in the senior ranks – of 5%, 10% or 15% women. That is stupid.
That is stupid.
So… we ignore older people as both customers and employees, even though they have money (what we want from customers) and experience (what we want from employees). And we ignore women in leadership, even though no matter what you sell, you’re probably selling to women. Hmmm. That’s awkward.
The solution
- Stop being obsessed with millennials
- Target your marketing/sales efforts at who might actually gain value from what you do, not some generalized age bucket
- Promote more women into leadership
- Hire for soft skills
- Build relationships
- Make more money
I got out of this in under 500 words. Go forth and prosper.
Good post! Excellent observations. You know I struggle as an ‘over 50’ person. I don’t feel old … heck I don’t even look that old … yet. However, something weird is going on … why is it over the past 7 years after a major job loss I still struggle to find something that remotely pales in comparison to what I was doing before? There are many answers to that question … some of them are directly related to me, my viewpoint, my ethics, my morals. Take all that away and there is still a little bucket left of unexplained reasons and they all point to ageism. I hate to point to that reason as the cause. I would hope that the people who interviewed me over the past 7 years were pure of thought, unfettered by personal perceptions and biases. But I guess I was the biggest fool out there who thought that somehow, after 7 years of searching that I would find at least one organization where I was ‘a good fit’, that ‘fits into the culture’. Status quo thinking is truly well engrained in our society and “damn it … we’re are not going to risk changing it … “. Skilled talented workers come from all age groups. To sum up … I know that if I had HALF the skills sets I do now in my 20’s, the probability of getting dozens of job offers over the past 7 years would not be questioned. Heck I turn 53 this year … I must be drooling and staring blankly into the wilderness … ready for the ol’ pasture.
Excellent observations yet again, Ted. (And thanks for the [unfortunate] anecdote, Michael L.) I might also add, as a recent job hunter and an aging Gen X’er, the real bias of “regionalism.” Are you “from here”? I was second place at least 3 times that I know of in the past 18 months in job searches, but they were all at places where I was a literal outsider. My only connection to those “from here” was extended family. That alone I’m convinced allowed me to rise to #2 in at least one recruitment. Otherwise, I wonder if I would’ve even been considered…? Anyway, another bias to investigate, Ted! Certainly not as insidious or headline-making as ageism, sexism, racism, etc., but real nonetheless…at least in the U.S.
I’ll do a post on this because I’ve experienced it too.
Ted, spot on. Where I work there are 5 (if you included the account guy and sometimes we don’t want to) of us in our late 50s to late 60s who really set the tone and direction. We are a small company (30 employees) but in an emerging market (wind/solar) that has a niche that we have served well (for over 30 years) and continue to serve well. How do we do this, experience, experience experience, knowledge,.knowledge, knowledge, soft skills all over and we build relationships with honesty, truth and straight talk. From all that we increase sales each year and we have the time to think ahead 2 to 3 years. We don’t obsess on the millennials because we’ve found no matter how much we would obsess we can’t change the ones we have on the team, they can only change themselves if they want to (and some do not). We work around, use what skills they have and just get it done. Is it sometimes frustrating yes and that’s just life in today’s world.
It is life, good and bad. Right?
Ted would not have it any other way. From the bad one can differentiate the good and if the good tends to outway the bad daily, weekly and yearly well that’s on the positive side is it not.
Ted, what you write here has been said by many people for many years. Bias, discrimination, and unfounded points of view, in any form, have been around for longer than we can look back. Society sets the pace and most organizations just follow in line. Not to sound cynical, but I often wonder if it’s just plain laziness or fear. It is easier to follow the status quo versus “disrupting” something and turning it on its ear.
The irony is that the organizations who don’t give a rat’s ass about age, sex, ethnicity, or country of origin, for example, are (generally) the ones we hear about as being an employer of choice. And what’s the common thread? They march to the beat of their own drum.
It’s quite often laziness, Trivella.
In my head, I’m still 35.
Oh Mr. Ted, nailed it once again. Work & or play, after 50, at some point, we become invisible… almost!
It’s a bit confusing. We go from experts to not knowing much quickly especially when technology is involved. Assumptions abound!