Getting Hired When Over 50

Getting Hired When Over 50

If you are over 50 and job hunting in Australia, the problem is almost certainly not what happens once you are inside an organisation. It is getting inside one.

Two pieces of current research say so, and they point in opposite directions on purpose.

The Australian Human Rights Commission and Diversity Council Australia published Age, Assumptions and Access at Work on 30 June 2026. It found that 19 per cent of workers aged 55 and over had experienced discrimination or harassment at work in the previous twelve months — against 27 per cent of workers aged 30 to 54, and 39 per cent of those aged 18 to 29. Older workers reported the least.

Now the hiring side. The Australian HR Institute and the Commission surveyed HR professionals for Older and Younger Workers: What Do Employers Think?, released 16 July 2025. Only 56 per cent said they were open “to a large extent” to hiring workers aged 50 to 64. For candidates 65 and over that falls to 28 per cent, and more than one in six will not hire them at all.

So: once you are in, you are treated comparatively well. You are simply much less likely to get in.

“Older” now starts at 51

The number that should concern anyone planning a move in their fifties: 24 per cent of HR professionals now classify workers aged 51 to 55 as “older” — up from 10 per cent in 2023.

That is a doubling in two years, and 51 is not a number most people would have guessed. If you are 52 and assuming this discussion is about someone else, roughly a quarter of the profession that screens your application has already filed you.

The same survey contains an admission you rarely see in print. One in five HR professionals said their own recruitment practices negatively affect older workers. Not that bias exists somewhere in the market — that it exists in the process they run.

What the law actually covers

Section 18 of the Age Discrimination Act 2004 is broader than most people assume. It is unlawful for an employer to discriminate on the ground of age:

“(a) in the arrangements made for the purpose of determining who should be offered employment; or (b) in determining who should be offered employment; or (c) in the terms or conditions on which employment is offered.”

Paragraph (a) is the one that matters here. It covers the arrangements — the screening process itself — not only the final decision. A filter that excludes older candidates before a human reads anything is captured by the section, whether or not anyone intended it.

Knowing that does not get you an interview. It is worth knowing anyway, because it tells you the problem is structural rather than personal.

What you can control on the page

You cannot format your way out of a decision that has already been made. You can avoid handing it over unnecessarily.

Graduation years. Our practice is to show the year on anything completed in the past fifteen years and drop it on anything older. A degree conferred in 1988 is doing no work that the degree itself does not already do, and the year invites arithmetic. Keep years on current designations and recent qualifications, where currency is the point.

Depth of history. Full detail on the last ten to fifteen years; everything before that compressed to a short block of roles and organisations. This is not concealment — the record is complete — but it puts the weight where the buying decision is made and stops the document reading as a chronology.

Technology. The assumption attached to an older candidate is that they are behind on systems. Adjectives confirm it. “Digitally literate”, “embraces new technology” and “adaptable to change” are what people write when they have nothing specific to name, and a reader who is already suspicious takes them as proof.

What defeats the assumption is one dated, named fact: “Led the Workday implementation across 1,200 staff, 2024.” A system with a year attached cannot be argued with. If you have done something like that in the last five years, it belongs high on the first page, and it will do more than a paragraph of enthusiasm.

Old names for things. The dater most people miss, because it is not a year.

If your qualification says “College of Advanced Education”, you have told the reader you finished before about 1990 — every CAE in the country was converted into a university under the Dawkins reforms, implemented from 1989. The year is gone from the line and the date is still there.

The same happens with employers that have since been renamed, merged or acquired, and with job titles that have moved on. “Personnel Manager” has been “HR Manager” for thirty years. “Data Processing” became IT before some of your readers were born. None of these are wrong, and all of them are timestamps.

Write the institution as it is currently known — the successor body holds your record, so that is accurate, not evasive. Where a former employer no longer exists under that name, the current name with the old one in brackets reads as precision rather than concealment.

Recency of scope. The strongest thing an experienced candidate has is that they have recently done the thing at scale. Make the most recent role the largest section on the page, not the last one on a long list.

What you cannot control, and what to do instead

None of the above beats a screen that has already excluded you. If a quarter of screeners treat 51 as old, some proportion of applications were never live.

Which is an argument about where you apply, not how. The unadvertised end of the market — where a search consultant or a chair goes looking for a name rather than waiting for applications — is where experience is the reason you are called rather than the objection to be managed. It is also where the volume filters that do the most damage do not operate.

That is not a comfortable answer, because it means the effort belongs in being findable and being known rather than in another round of applications. But it follows directly from the data: the barrier is the door, and the door you want is the one nobody queues at.

Sources

• Australian Human Rights Commission and Diversity Council Australia, Age, Assumptions and Access at Work: Employee Experiences of Age Inclusion in the Workplace, released 30 June 2026.
• Australian HR Institute and Australian Human Rights Commission, Older and Younger Workers: What Do Employers Think?, released 16 July 2025 — the most recent edition of this survey.
• Age Discrimination Act 2004 (Cth), s 18(1), quoted verbatim.
• Dawkins reforms: all Colleges of Advanced Education converted to universities, implemented from 1989.

All read 19 August 2026.