Back to work, on their terms

It’s always been the case that some folks retire, then go back to work. Why? Maybe they get bored in retire­ment. Per­haps they feel iso­lat­ed. Or they find that they don’t have as much mon­ey as they thought they would. What­ev­er the rea­son, there have always been folks look­ing to re-enter the work­force – and there have always been some employ­ers that are will­ing to hire them.

But the devel­oped world is begin­ning to expe­ri­ence what Japan has long been famil­iar with – an aging work­force, and close to full employ­ment. In such an envi­ron­ment, employ­ers find that they sim­ply can’t rely com­plete­ly on tra­di­tion­al work­ers. I wrote about this a few years ago – and it’s still an issue. A declin­ing birth rate also con­tributes the chal­lenges of enough work­ers, and one of the past ways of increas­ing work­ers, via immi­gra­tion, has fall­en out of favor in some coun­tries. What oth­er options do employ­ers have – and how can job boards help them?

Japan has point­ed to one option: hir­ing retirees. Instead of wait­ing for retirees to ran­dom­ly re-enter the work­force, they have for­mal­ly reached out to them and invit­ed them back. This is smart for sev­er­al rea­sons. Many retirees may not have con­sid­ered work­ing again, sim­ply because their work his­to­ry was not a hap­py mem­o­ry – maybe they had mean boss­es and rigid sched­ules. Oth­ers may not real­ize that flex­i­ble sched­ules and less-than-40 hour work weeks are more avail­able now.

This is where job boards can help.

Why not include a ‘retirees wel­come’ mark­er on those jobs where the employ­ers want to hire retirees? Or offer a ‘retiree-friend­ly’ option to check when the job seek­er search­es on your site? Job boards aimed at retirees have been around a while – but options to find retiree-friend­ly posi­tions haven’t shown up on most oth­er job boards. Why not add some con­tent on your site – just as you prob­a­bly have when tar­get­ing oth­er spe­cial groups, such as minori­ties or recent grads – that focus­es on the options avail­able to retirees who want to go back to work? One sug­ges­tion, though: spend some time talk­ing to retirees who have returned to the work­force in your par­tic­u­lar niche; learn what chal­lenges they’ve faced, and what they have found reward­ing. In oth­er words, under­stand your tar­get job seek­er!

Of course, plen­ty of folks know exact­ly what they want to do in their retire­ment – and it may not include work. But some­times, folks get sur­prised. And they go back to work!

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