EMPLOYMENT Retirees return to job market

Bad news for teens: Some companies prefer retirees over younger applicants.
CBS MARKETWATCH
SAN FRANCISCO -- Though she counts herself among those seniors whose retirement portfolio was mangled by the bear market, Kathryn Kirleis isn't looking for a job for the money alone.
"All I did was watch television," said Kirleis, 67, a resident of Spring Hill, Fla. Her retirement earlier this year plus her father's recent death combined to keep her in bed all day.
Now, she realizes that "having appointments, doing something meaningful, staying connected to the world -- it's very important. I could see how easy it would be to curl up and wait."
Kirleis is also hedging her bets financially. "I evidently am liquid enough to get by for right now," she said, but she has yet to develop a budget and is not sure how long her nest egg will sustain her.
Thus, Kirleis is re-entering the job market. She recently applied for a job with the Home Shopping Network, joined a job-board Web site that caters to seniors and took on occasional consulting work based on her previous profession as a clinical social worker. She also expects to land a paying job at a hospice in coming months.
Here's the trend
And she's not alone. From a 92-year-old woman who is simply "looking for something to do" to a 75-year-old who went back to work as an interpreter in South America, placement agencies report that retirees are working again.
Whether as consultants, retail clerks or school aides, among other jobs, they are driven back to work in pursuit of a challenge or more income -- or both.
Instead of facing employers' disinterest or the discrimination often bestowed upon gray-haired workers, companies are starting to welcome seniors.
Some say it's bad news for teens, but employers now realize that seniors often make for better employees -- more reliable, more experienced, more polite and with more flexible schedules, experts said.
Renee Ward, founder of two job-board Web sites, Teens4Hire.org and Seniors4Hire.org, said some employers have complained that teens "don't show up, and if they do, they're not on time," she said. Plus, teens don't always understand customer service.
Older workers have been a bright spot in an otherwise dismal labor market. Though labor-market participation declined for other age groups in recent years, older Americans increased their job-market presence.
Of Americans age 55 and over, 35.6 percent worked in June, up from 32.4 percent at the end of 2000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Since some of those seniors are simply delaying retirement, exactly how many retired and then returned to work is unclear. Yet some signs point to a significant number of retirees' resetting their alarm clocks.
Sixty-eight percent of firms said they currently employ former retirees, according to a recent survey of 424 companies by the Society for Human Resource Management, and 39 percent said they currently hire retirees as consultants or temporary workers.
Employer requests
Also, activity has jumped at job-board Web sites directed toward senior workers. Ward launched Seniors4Hire.org earlier this year in response to employer requests.
"More and more of the employers that we were calling, [those] that we thought would be the marketplace for teens, are moving away from teens and preferring older workers," Ward said. "That represents a real pendulum swing. The traditional mind-set is that older workers are not wanted."
About 40 percent of the 1,700 employers Ward works with have requested seniors, a steep increase from years past, when less than 5 percent did so, she said.
SeniorJobBank.org, another site focused on seniors, has seen a sharp increase in visitors seeking work. "Last year, we averaged about 3,000 unique visitors a day. Now we're averaging about 7,000 a day," said Eric Summers, founder of SeniorJobBank.org.
"A surprising number of professional people, [former] CEOs of companies, they're just bored," Summers said. "They have the profit motive ingrained in them after four decades of working. They want to do something and be compensated."
Summers agreed that employers' view of seniors has changed. "They've always thought seniors are a liability [because] they have to pay them more," he said. But firms find that seniors are "not looking to go back to work and make $50 an hour or whatever they were at their peak. They just want to supplement their income."
Variety of companies
Wal-Mart's practice of hiring seniors as greeters is perhaps the most well-known example, but the companies that hire seniors encompass all types of industries and professions, experts said. For instance, retirees of all types from knowledge professions are hired back as consultants.
Jo Manhart runs a job-placement agency in Columbia, Mo., that specializes in seniors (the Web site is www.availablejones.com). The jobs she's found for seniors include marketing director for a retirement community, handyman, office manager, painter, auditor, executive assistant, accountant, interpreter, receptionist, software installer and test proctor.
At Seniors4Hire.org, there are teller positions, call-center positions, jobs for technologists who have retooled, grocery-stores checkers and produce workers, Ward said.
The key to getting hired as a senior? "Don't assume that nobody wants them," Ward said. "They sometimes will go into an interview carrying that chip on their shoulder. They need to understand that there are a number of employers out there interested in having them join their organization. Not all, but there's a stronger population of companies now."