Labels and Ageism: The Discounting of Older Worker ‘Potential’
The Issue
This month we continue our exploration of structural contributors to ageism built into company recruitment processes. We explore the perils of the importance of that mystical recruitment element of ‘potential’ for older workers. Our view is the use of the label of ‘potential’ in any hiring decision reinforces an implicit ageism within a recruitment process embedding structural ageism within an organisation.
Recruiters in distilling the secret of making a great hire often talk about how an individual’s past performance provides a solid signpost for their future performance. Understanding a person’s skills and how they’ve developed and applied them in delivering outcomes, all provide significant insights into their future motivations and capability. However, for some time now many large organisations have complicated the hiring process by not just being satisfied with an evidence-based analysis of a person’s skill sets and ability to successfully apply them, but now adding highly subjective labels including ‘potential’ and ‘organisation fit’ into the recruitment decision-making process. These labels often have little to do with a person’s ability to successfully perform their role, but more with a perceived social acceptability within the organisation. Whether this leads to better hiring decisions and improved business performance is open to question.
Despite ‘potentials’ business popularity, there is no agreed understanding of its meaning.
‘Potential’ by definition is something that has not yet been realised but is held to be discoverable and developable over time. ‘Potential’ is also broadly thought to be a scarce individual feature applying to a small minority of the workforce. The business belief ‘potential’ represents a scarce and valuable future resource sees the label assessed as more important to an organisation than experience or achievement; a critical element associated with individual promotability and vital to sustaining hierarchic work structures. In the business world, given the subjectivity involved in discovering ‘potential’, this makes the idea of it as a scarce and valuable future commodity a highly contestable proposition.
Associating the label of ‘potential’ to preserving traditional work structures as part of a hiring decision brings the business future into consideration. The connection of a future business state with an immediate hiring decision introduces age considerations into recruitment decision-making. Using the highly reductive logic involved within traditional recruitment thinking, the younger a worker is then the greater is their ‘potential’ as they offer more personal growth possibility. My PhD research confirmed, simplistically, HR managers believe younger workers have more personal growth capacity than older workers, therefore possessing more individual potential which makes them a more attractive hiring proposition. This strongly suggests implicit ageism is built into recruiter understandings of ‘potential’.
What is stopping recruiters associating the label ‘potential’ to older workers in a world where we are all living longer, are healthier for longer, cognitively alert for longer and many workers want to extend their careers for longer? Research is suggesting part of the answer lies in the different ways we think about the past and the future.
Recruiters weigh the past and future differently in making recruitment decisions
Considerable research suggests that people relate to the future and past differently, with studies indicating that thinking about the future can be more emotionally intense and can elicit more extreme evaluations than thinking about the past. In offering the exciting possibility of the new or undiscovered, the future, becomes a prime organisation focus which then depreciates the perceived value of the past and those who represent it. This insight might help explain the seeming organisational preference for potential over achievement and by extension the younger rather than older worker. Organisations, to have any chance of successfully engaging with the future must find a way to continually sustain themselves. Hierarchy structures and their maintenance by youthful workforces appear important considerations. Whilst true to a large extent, this thinking reflects twentieth century business thinking with its acceptance of a simplistic three stage life cycle, an outmoded view of the nature of careers, the view that all older workers have a ‘use by date’ in their 50s and that there will always be a plentiful supply of young people to recruit from.
To emphasise how people think differently about the past and future a particular research study (refer Tormala reference) undertook eight separate investigations using lab and field settings and a variety of content domains. Consistently the study found that high potential could be more interesting and alluring than equally high achievement. The potential to be good at something can sometimes be preferred to actually being good at that very same thing. Despite recognising that achievement is more objectively impressive on a resume, whereas potential is more uncertain, participants consistently displayed more favourable assessments of individuals with potential than of individuals with achievement on measures of preference, interest, and liking.
Why Recruiters Might Prioritise ‘Potential’ over ‘Experience’
Whilst the Tormala study was explicit that the preference for potential is not contingent upon predictions of future outcomes, it was still acknowledged that having a future focus could accentuate the effect of potential, whereas having a past focus might sometimes dampen or reverse it. Importantly, the study observed the age of the recruiter may influence the preference for potential over achievement. Younger recruiters are more likely to be future-focused, whereas older ones more past oriented. This finding suggests that recruiter age in a hiring decision may influence preferences for potential or achievement.
The unstated and fallacious assumption in this observation is that the older worker is incapable of future personal growth, development and ultimately promotability – a self-fulfilling outcome if organisation recruitment practices continue to be rooted in the past.
How This Organisation Practice Maybe Harming Your Business
A trend in organisations is the appointment of recruitment teams heavily populated with younger employees. Another trend is the prioritisation of labels over skills in recruitment decision-making. The double-whammy risk is that younger recruiters fail to consider the growth upside of older workers whilst depreciating the value of their skills and achievements to helping overcome future business challenges. Ensuring a good age mix within recruitment teams and an emphasis on tapping into skills not labels suggest as prudent actions to improving recruitment decision-making, increasing workplace diversity and business outcomes.
Do you know how much your existing recruitment practices may be penalising your business?
If the above questions have made you reflect on your workplace dynamics, please contact us and let us help you take practical steps to transform your existing workplace into an inclusive age-neutral one that develops your competitive and performance capability.
Selected References
Fernandez-Araoz, C. (2014). 21st century talent spotting: Why potential now trumps brains, experience, and “competencies”. Harvard Business Review (June).
Meyers, M. C., van Woerkom, M., & Dries, N. (2013). Talent — Innate or acquired? Theoretical considerations and their implications for talent management. Human Resource Management Review, 23(4), 1-17.
Riach, K., & Kelly, S. (2015). The need for fresh blood: Understanding organizational age inequality through a vampiric lens. Organization, 22(3), 287-305.
Silzer, R., & Church, A. H. (2009). The pearls and perils of identifying potential. Industrial and Organizational Psychology(2), 377 - 412.
Tormala, Z. L., Jia, J. S., & Norton, M. I. (2012). The preference for potential. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 567-583.
Yost, P. R., & Chang, G. (2009). Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2, 442-445.
