Hiring Midlife Talent
Identifying and Developing a Hidden Source of Exceptional Talent
There is a smart, motivated, and well educated source of talent who is not in the current labor market: stay-at-home parents whose kids have left the nest. After a 10, 20 or 30 year career gap, it is very hard for these folks to connect with employers due to biases in recruiting. If you are not actively identifying candidates in this hidden pool of talent, you are missing out on talented and motivated people who could bring a wealth of transferable skills to your organization.
We'd like to change that.
Why This is Important to Us
When Managing Director Jen Lawrence, stepped out of the paid workforce to raise her two kids as a single parent, she had no idea how hard it would be to step back in. In spite of having an MBA, building a wold-recognized blog, her experiences with an onboarding program for moms to re-enter the workforce was less than satisfying in spite of the fact it was paid for by one of the companies hope to hire her.
She was told her new skills developed while at home with her kids - writing, marketing, communications, project management and social media - were irrelevant since they'd not been tested in the paid workplace. She was told that if she wanted to go back into corporate life she have to accept a major demotion and significantly less pay. Entrepreneurship was the better solution since clients don't care about results, not resume gaps, and there are no gatekeepers to success. She created The Midlife Edit, a coaching container for midlife women returning to the workforce to identify their transferable skills.
Why This is Important to You
At a time when it is hard to find talented employees, there is a pool of people with proven track records who are ready to contribute to your organization. If you are using recruiting systems that are penalizing gaps on a resume or are not identifying valuable transferable skills, you are missing out on a significant source of talent.
You Already Have the Systems in Place
The pace of business transformation, technology change and innovation means that all of your employees require upskilling or reskilling when it comes to technical skills every few years. Most organizations have developed training and development programs to make sure their employees are keeping pace with innovation. A midlife hire can easily update their technical skills through your existing training programs.
The only skills that never become obsolete are transferable skills and midlife hires tend to have well-honed transferable skills build over decades of paid and unpaid work. When it comes to things like communications skills, negotiating skills, project management, and leadership, life experience can build exceptional talent. If you can identify these transferable skills and assess a willingness to upskill or reskill, you can access a hidden pool of talent.
Let Us Custom Create a Workshop for You
We would love to work with your talent recruitment and development team to make your organization the top choice for talented employees. You will learn:
- What midlife hires are looking for in an organization
- How to identify transferable skills
- How to have conversations about reskilling or upskilling with potential hires
- How to nurture and develop midlife talent
- How to navigate job level discussions
- Tips for facilitating age-diverse teamwork
- The reasons a midlife hire will leave your organization
- The hidden benefits of a midlife hire
- How to maximize transferable skills deployment
- Hidden biases in job descriptions
- Performance management and talent development for midlife hires
- Onboarding techniques that maximize success
Training Tools
We use a variety of powerful training tools developed over decades of work with organizations such as our Skills Inventory tool. We also use proven coaching tools to help an organization shape their recruiting and people development practices including:
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®
- Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator®
- Career Interest Profiler
- Career Values Scale
- FIRO Business™
- FIRO-B®
- Stress Profile
- Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument
- Work Engagement Profile
- Work Personality Index
- Trauma of Money Method™
