Grey Area: How Perception is Working to Undervalue Older Workers
Most of us will be familiar with the phrase ‘perception is reality’. I once had an HR boss who almost adopted this phrase as a mantra, particularly when it came to recruitment decision-making. We drove each other bananas as I then struggled with his view, believing it stopped anyone from seeing what really might exist. Only later, in senior leadership roles did I come to better understand my old boss’s perspective. Under unrelenting time pressure and forever juggling a variety of organisation issues, the requirement of making fast business decisions that were defensible rather than perfect, made the phrase resonate more positively with me, albeit with some discomfort.
These perception memories came back to haunt me this month, when a colleague shared a recent short Korn Ferry recruitment post providing tips to older workers on how to reduce the perception of appearing out-dated to recruiters. These included not using old email domains, not possessing antiquated home technology or not having an ancient LinkedIn profile. This post angered my colleague as it seemed to them to be once more be reinforcing negative older worker stereotypes. Korn Ferry argues in today’s ever-tougher job market, mistakes can be costly—especially the ones that show that you’re out of touch, particularly if you are a ’boomer’ already concerned age is a barrier to being hired. In today’s job world, perception it seems is not a friend to the older worker.
Reading the Korn Ferry article, on one hand I could appreciate they were trying to be helpful, yet like my colleague I also felt the article reinforced the negative stereotypes of older workers as change resistant and technology dinosaurs. This article once more raised for me the perils in perception. I graphically recalled my interview with an HR Director in the telecommunications industry as part of my PhD research who confidently stated he could tell how modern and adaptable an older worker was in a recruitment interview by the type of suit and tie they wore! This Director believed it was important for a 50 year plus candidate to present as a bit younger to generate a positive first impression. A failure to present in a ‘young’ and ‘modern’ way demonstrated older recruitment candidates were prisoners of bygone thinking, non-adaptive and unlikely to represent a desired corporate brand image. You have to wonder at the predictive power of perception!
The Nature of Perception
The neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains perception as a constructive process helping build within us a mental representation of what is out there in the world and in doing so, allowing us to interact with it as our brain understands it is and not as it may appear to be. We also tend to become increasingly perceptual the more we age. Our brain has a predisposition to pattern-matching, so the more experiences we accumulate through life, allows our brain to operate more efficiently when confronted by a new experience through making inferences rather than trying to decode every little perceptual detail. This represents a kind of categorisation exercise.
Levitin likens our brains to an efficient filing clerk, working to combine things to make larger categories, minimising the possibility of cluttering our filing system brain with lots of single item mental folders. A consequence of creating these larger mental categories is the tendency towards our thinking being generalised when we encounter a new experience. Stereotyping represents an example of generalised thinking being applied to a group of people. How our thinking chooses to categorise a group can then influence our perceptions of individuals based on their group membership.
Perception has many benefits. Perceptual judgments are often fast and automatic which can be useful in time-sensitive scenarios. Perception is context-sensitive allowing people to quickly adapt to changing environments. With experience, perceptual cues (intuition) can become a reliable decision aid. Perception also includes emotional awareness, a valuable support when considering interpersonal or business decisions.
However, we also understand the risk of bias and subjectivity associated with perception. In the first instance, perception is an emotional response to a situation based on what’s immediately observable and further distorted by our overconfidence in estimating the accuracy of our intuition. Often this leads to the stereotyping of others by assuming the worst.
We fail to dig deeper to access perhaps less visible information or find our views overinfluenced by a vivid anecdote we remember. The academic Bobby Duffy explains as humans we are wired to look for causation, but in our quest to search for patterns, we regularly confuse correlation with causation, bestowing the patterns we might find with meaning when there may well be none. Thus, Korn Ferry creating a pattern connecting an older worker to an old e-mail domain allowing them to determine such a person is outdated and a technology dinosaur is an example of how our perception might distort reality or ascribe incorrect meaning to a situation.
The antidote to becoming a prisoner of perception is in becoming more contemplative, in slowing down our thinking and becoming more deliberative in our approach to evaluation. This sounds clearly like wishful thinking when we live in a world dominated by time pressure and speed, a world that seemingly encourages a prioritisation of perception in our decision- making.
‘Presentism’ and Perception
A fascinating way to think about the role of perception in our current world is to think about it within the context of the meaning of time. Our pre-occupation with short-terminism is a very new concept when weighed up against our time on earth. Richard Fisher in his book exploring the nature of time, notes a group of scholars arguing since the 1980s in Western civilisation there has been a convergence of a series of societal trends giving rise to a temporal state described as ‘presentism’. This is defined as a period in which there is the sense only the present exists characterised by the tyranny of the instant and the treadmill of the unending now. We are now living in a time when the past is no longer a source of wisdom or comfort, the present has become all-consuming and the future is not what it used to be.
In such a time-blinkered age hard won knowledge is ignored in practice with all modes of thinking shaped primarily by present day concerns. The emphasis on the now and short-term makes it easy to see how perception can become prioritised as a primary assessment tool and decision-guide in for example recruitment. Yet, when our work world might benefit from slowing down some of its activities, we seem intent on trying to further increase the speed and ‘presentism’ by which we work. In Australia, it seems ironic that the faster we have become at performing our work, the less productive as a nation (if we take the statistics over the past 15-20 years) we have become. Counter intuitively, maybe slowing down our thinking and decision-making and reducing our reliance on perception may actually be a smarter business approach than relentlessly cranking up our work speed.
The importance of the ‘now’ in a world of ‘presentism’ risks a negative perception of an older worker increasing when short- term thinking, superficial characterisation, risk aversion and a preference for speed over judgement in employment decision-making have become valued behaviours. The belief Artificial Intelligence (AI) might represent a rational antidote to personal perception is also misplaced.
AI is being found to disproportionally impact marginalised groups (think both older and younger workers in this instance) because the data used to train the algorithms is often drawn from historical sources that reflect their own patterns of bias. Sajia Ferdous in a recent ‘The Conversation’ article observes technology industry workers are overwhelmingly young, think homogenously and build tech systems for the benefit of younger people. Their thinking breeds blind spots potentially alienating other age groups. Ferdous argues AI as it currently operates is inherently ageist.
Compounding this ongoing perceptual threat to older workers, a recent CBS news United States report involving over 1300 people in manager- level positions, highlighted managers are increasingly outsourcing personnel-related matters to a range of AI tools, despite their not being well-versed in how to use the technology. Their report based on an independent survey found that while one-third of people in charge of employees' career trajectories have no formal training in using AI tools, 65% use it to make work-related decisions. The clear danger is machine based older worker bias further reinforcing any existing negative perceptions of the recruiter using AI. Talk about opening a new legal can of worms in the age discrimination field.
Some Final Thoughts
The Korn Ferry article made me wonder why the problem of the perceived negative relationship between the older worker and digital technology is purely sheeted home to the supposed behaviour of the individual? Certainly, there is a responsibility for all workers to keep their skills updated, but why is no responsibility taken by business for their contribution to this issue through their ongoing failure to invest in the skill development of their workforces, particularly their over 50s cohort? In this circumstance, the continual reinforcement of the perception of the individual older worker as an out-of-date technology dinosaur, acts, if you are a company, as a convenient distractor from placing a spotlight on the contributory negligence of much of the business community for the lack of digital skills development within the workforce. Perception can become a powerful tool to scapegoat the older worker for industry failures.
The narrow use of perception to reinforce ageist older worker tropes allows a one-dimensional and misleading view of their capability to dominate, ignoring the multitude of skills and experience they might offer the workforce. The seeming recruiter pre-occupation with an older worker’s technical ability appears at odds with a recent World Economic Forum (WEF) survey of over 1,000 employers, representing more than 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies identifying the critical job skills employees will need to possess.
Whilst AI and big data is understood as the fastest growing skill, analytical thinking remains the most sought-after core skill, followed by resilience, flexibility and agility along with leadership and social influence, creative thinking and a predisposition to curiosity and lifelong learning. The WEF concludes having a combination of cognitive, self-efficacy and interpersonal skills within the top 5 required job skills emphasises the importance to having agile, innovative and collaborative workforces, where problem-solving abilities and personal resilience are critical for success. Many employers are recognising the criticality of a variety of ‘soft skills’ to business success, skills that transcend generations, yet recruiters remain fixated on the narrow need for digital competence. Such a short-sighted and damaging approach is consistent with living in a ‘presentism’ world.
The Korn Ferry article highlighted how recruiter perception is not the friend of the older worker right now. There may be a million reasons an older worker has an old email address or not a world class video system. This does automatically consign them to a perception of being digitally out of touch. This view reinforces a common misconception that older people are reluctant to adopt technology or cannot catch up. As Farhous concludes this is far from the truth and oversimplifies the complexity of older worker abilities and interests in the digital environment.
Relying too heavily on perception when assessing older workers’ skills risks reinforcing stereotypes, overlooking talent and missing an opportunity to build a productive age inclusive workforce. While perception is a natural human shortcut, it becomes a dangerous substitute for evidence when left unchallenged.
To build workplaces that truly value experience and capability, resisting the urge to judge quickly or superficially is critical. Ultimately, it’s not about ignoring perception but putting it in its rightful place as one of many assessment tools, not the only one. The world of ‘presentism’ does not make this easy, yet taking the time to dig deeper, asking better questions, looking at skills and experiences from more than one angle we believe will result in smarter decisions, stronger teams, and a fairer work future.
We’re happy to speak to your organisation on tackling the challenges of perception when it comes to understanding the opportunities older workers represent and how to make age-inclusive teams’ work. It's a winning proposition for your organisation.
References
Korn Ferry. (2025). 5 Cringeworthy Ways Job Candidates Appear Outdated. (July15) https://www.kornferry.com/insights/this-week-in-leadership/5-cringeworthy-ways-job-candidates-appear-outdated
CBS News. (2025). AI could determine whether you get hired or fired as more managers rely on the technology at work. (July 8). https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ai-hired-fired-promotion-managers/
The Conversation. (2025). AI is inherently ageist. That’s not just unethical – it can be costly for workers and businesses. (April 22) https://theconversation.com/ai-is-inherently-ageist-thats-not-just-unethical-it-can-be-costly-for-workers-and-businesses-254220
Duffy, B. (2018). The Perils of Perception: Why We’re Wrong About Nearly Everything. Atlantic Books. London
Fisher, R. (2023). The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time. Wildfire. London.
Levitin, D.J. (2020). Successful Ageing. A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives. Dutton. USA.
World Economic Forum. (2025). Future of Jobs Report 2025: Insight Report https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future_of_Jobs_Report_2025.pdf
