This post is great. Very well crafted to make the point in a noisy media like LinkedIn. (By the way, how do you manage to get more than 150.000 likes?)

I HIRED a candidate with 30 years experience. The HR manager was not impressed. She said he is ‘too old’ and won’t “fit into our culture.”

He had been laid off by his previous employer due to restructuring at the age of 53 yrs. He kept applying but was rejected for being “overqualified” which led to his ’employment gap” reaching almost 1 yr.

Everyone is looking for that 18 year old with 20 years experience.

This guy brought an abundance of experience and taught me a lot that I never learned from all my years in the industry.

You can’t Google Experience. Employers if you want good talent you need to be considering the “OVERQUALIFIED” candidates.

The truth is ‘Overqualified’ is really the code word for age discrimination. AGEISM in the workplace is very real and quite acceptable.

It seems the EEOC has no interest in enforcing the law. ATS systems require dates. If they don’t ask your age, they require employment dates and the date of college graduation.

Our society needs to change. All that should matter is if the candidate has the right skills and attitude to do the job.

It’s time to stop discrimination on the grounds of a person’s age.

Agree?

However, it fails to recognise that, so far, ageing (retiring the previous generation) is the fundamental mechanism of nature’s main algorithm: evolution. And pretty much everything depends critically on this algorithm. Our society silently acknowledges it, turning a blind eye without making too much noise. Old experienced people are not OVERQUALIFIED, they are just OVER-FITTED.

Is it time to change this? Well, I am all for it (for obvious reasons), but I am not sure we are ready yet.