Forbes interviews Wharton School of Business professor Peter Cappelli, who explains why employers are often reluctant to hire Baby Boomers -- and why they shouldn't be.
The problem is age discrimination is huge and endemic: age discrimination by a lot of measures is a bigger issue than it is for race or gender! It is perfectly OK for everybody to tell jokes and make fun of old people, but you would never think about doing that for other groups. The reason this matters so much is because older workers otherwise seem to represent exactly what employers want on almost all measures of job performance.
In fact if you are curious I will tell you what the other one is where they are not, but on every other measure of job performance older workers do better -- they perform better in terms of their jobs, their attendance is better, their interpersonal skills are better, we think that is becoming increasingly important, and they offer employers now sort of a just-in-time work force, particularly those who hit normal typical retirement ages want to work someplace often a little different for a relatively short period of time.
Original source: ForbesRead the full story here.