According to a study by Kimberly-Clark Russia and the recruiting platform hh.ru, as the age of a candidate in the online job database increases, his resume receives less and less feedback from employers. At the same time, questionnaires in which age is not indicated are comparable in their relevance to the resumes of young applicants. The situation is similar with the salaries offered – they grow up to 40-55 years, and then begin to decline markedly. The main reason for the low interest of employers in older workers is the gradual obsolescence of their professional skills.
As follows from the results of the study by Kimberly-Clark Russia and hh.ru, the majority of online resumes in Russia are represented by job seekers aged 24 to 45 — 58.8%. Candidates aged 18 to 23 years old submitted 18% of the questionnaires, from 46 to 55 years old – 9.4%. The share of applicants over 56 years old in the total number of resumes is only 2.8%.
Analysts note that as candidates age, their chances of getting an invitation to an interview from an employer decrease, regardless of industry. So, if among candidates aged 18–23 the share of those who received at least one offer for an interview is 85%, then in the category of 31–45 years this figure drops to 71%, and for 56–60 years – to 55%. The lowest demand is among people over 70 years old – a preliminary interest in them arises only in 41% of cases. At the same time, candidates who do not indicate their age in the resume receive invitations for an interview twice as often as candidates over 45 years old.
Similar results – about the presence of employers’ prejudice towards age candidates – were also demonstrated by the analysis of the median salaries offered. For example, in areas such as security, accounting, senior management, domestic staff, the indicator of the proposed salary increases continuously for candidates up to 55 years old, after which it drops to values below the starting values for young professionals.
It should be noted that despite the limited sample of such a study – and it is narrowed primarily by the specific audience of job selection sites (according to NAFI, only about a third of those who are looking for a job use them) – it is obvious that older candidates experience more problems with employment. As the Higher School of Economics study “Age, Productivity, Wages” shows, the peak of earnings on average is reached before the age of 40, after which they begin to decline.
According to the RANEPA, in the Russian labor market, men and women of pre-retirement age (over 55), with the exception of the most educated, have lower chances of finding a job than workers on average. Only women of pre-retirement age with higher education are more likely to be employed than the average for all workers aged 25–64. The main reason for the decline in interest in older workers (apart from the gradual transformation of the structure of the economy in favor of the service sector – employees aged 45+ are mainly employed in the sectors of heavy industry and public services) is the “obsolescence” of human capital. According to the Russian Monitoring of the Economic Situation and Public Health of the Higher School of Economics, no more than 22% of employees in Russia are covered by vocational education that allows them to upgrade the skills of employees (including those who were trained in labor protection and safety). According to the authors of the report of the Center for Strategic Research “Russian Labor Market: Trends, Institutions, Structural Changes”, if in European countries enterprises spend an average of 1.6% of the wage fund on additional training of employees, and leading countries – and more than 2% , then in Russia this figure is only 0.3%.
In this situation, according to experts from the Center for Project Activities and Communication Technologies of the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH), a job search within the framework of not traditional, but platform employment, that is, freelancing, may become promising for older Russians, according to experts from the Center for Project Activities and Communication Technologies. The volume of the platform economy, according to MasterCard, will double by 2027 and reach $864 billion.