Ageism – It’s Real, But It’s Not a Dealbreaker
October 17, 2024
This year the bell tolled 40, and it got me thinking about ageism in job search.
I am no longer in the bracket that hiring conversations quietly favour — old enough to know a few things, young enough not to be “past it”. That bracket never appears in a published job description, but it is real, and anyone who has sat on the hiring side has heard it discussed.
Many of my clients name ageism as the reason their search feels slow. They remember the interest they attracted at 35 and compare it with the silence at 52, and the conclusion seems obvious. Having spent years in the talent business, in thousands of conversations with hiring managers and candidates, I can confirm the premise: ageism exists, and it will not stop existing because I write an article about it.
But the conclusion most people draw from it — “they think I’m too old” — is usually wrong about the mechanism. And the mechanism is where your leverage is.
What is actually being calculated
Take a 55-year-old sales leader competing against a 35-year-old for the same role, at an established company with a solid market share. The older candidate has the better network, the deeper relationships, the longer record. On paper it is no contest. So why does the younger one so often get hired?
Because of what the employer is actually buying. At an established business, the client relationships already exist — they belong to the company. The role is to maintain and grow them. For that job, the younger candidate’s lower cost and longer runway genuinely are the better commercial answer, and no amount of grey-haired gravitas changes the arithmetic. The 55-year-old was not rejected for being old. They were rejected because the thing their seniority buys — a black book, hard-won judgement, the ability to open doors that are closed to others — was not what this particular role needed.
Now flip the situation. A scale-up entering the Swiss market with no relationships, no reputation and eighteen months of funding cannot afford to wait for a 35-year-old to build a network. They are buying exactly what the senior candidate has. Same candidate, same age, opposite outcome — because the economics flipped.
This is the pattern behind a great deal of what gets experienced as ageism. The rejection is real. The explanation “too old” is a shorthand — sometimes the employer’s lazy shorthand, sometimes the candidate’s painful one — for a mismatch between what your experience is worth and what that specific role pays for.
Why this reframe matters
If the problem were purely prejudice, your only move would be to hide your age: trim the CV to fifteen years, delete the graduation date, hope. People do this, and it is mostly wasted effort, because the interviewer meets you eventually.
If the problem is economics, the moves are different and far more effective.
**Target roles that buy what age sells.** Turnarounds, market entries, first commercial hires, situations with no playbook, businesses that need judgement on day one rather than potential in year three. These exist in numbers in this region — the biotech scene alone produces a steady stream of companies that need someone who has seen it before. Stop applying to roles whose economics favour youth and the rejection rate transforms, because you have stopped asking employers to pay a premium for something they do not need.
**Make the value of the experience explicit.** “25 years in commercial roles” is a number that triggers the cost calculation. “I have launched in three markets where the reimbursement rules changed mid-flight, and I know which corners can be cut and which cannot” is a claim that justifies it. Experience stated as duration sounds expensive. Experience stated as capability sounds like insurance. This is the same work I have written about elsewhere — turning a career from a list into a thesis — and for candidates over 50 it is not optional polish. It is the difference between your seniority reading as a price tag or a reason.
**Answer the unasked questions before they are asked.** The hiring manager interviewing a candidate twenty years their senior has quiet doubts they will never voice: will this person take direction from me, are they current, do they still have the appetite. You do not fix these with declarations (“I’m very energetic”). You fix them with evidence threaded through your stories — the recent tool you adopted, the younger colleague you backed, the thing you learned last year. Shown, never claimed.
The part that stays true
If your experience keeps reading as a price tag instead of a reason, that’s a positioning problem — and those have solutions. Let’s talk it over.
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