The biggest risk for older job seekers isn’t rejection; it’s the silence from hiring managers that can turn a career dry spell into long-term unemployment, executive career coach and strategist Loren Greiff told Business Insider. She sees it happen all the time in her work with executives over 40 years old.
“Smart, credentialed leaders get stuck because they’re running on an outdated operating system,” Greiff said, adding that while younger workers are often hired for potential, older executives aren’t.
“Older workers are evaluated through a lens of cost, immediacy, and risk,” she said. “When passion leads the narrative, employers often translate it into ‘unfocused,’ ‘expensive,’ or ‘overqualified.'”
That’s why Greiff doesn’t tell older executives to abandon passion — she advises them to sequence it differently. She believes passion should simply become a byproduct, not the pitch.
“Those who lead with passion first don’t usually get rejected outright; they get stalled,” she said. “And that’s how well-intentioned ‘I’ve earned this’ thinking quietly turns into long-term unemployment.”
To rewire these experienced candidates to become more hireable, the first thing Greiff asks them to do is think about their next role and rank their “3 C’s” — culture, compensation, and challenge — in terms of priority.
Once the self-exploration has been established within the framework of the 3 C’s, Greiff guides older job seekers to push past their own goals and think from the perspective of employers.
Why the 3 C’s matter so much to older workers
When younger workers lack clarity on their 3 C’s, the penalty is usually inefficiency, Greiff said.
“They can more readily take an immediate wrong role and quickly move again,” she explained. “A wrong move early in a career is a detour.”
But for older job seekers, the consequences can be far more dire.
“Employers tend to have less tolerance for experimentation with senior hires, and later in your career, there’s simply less runway to recover from a misstep,” Greiff said.
That’s why Greiff believes that having clarity about your desired career trajectory via the 3 C’s isn’t a preference for older workers — it’s a risk-management tool.
The ‘C’ you choose as your top priority is your non-negotiable in your job search
If your primary concern in your next role is about a new challenge, Greiff said, it’s too ambiguous to simply say you want to move to the next level.
She pushes her clients to ask themselves questions to pinpoint their exact type of challenge:
- Is the challenge you seek a need for intellectual stimulation?
- Do you want to move into a more innovative area?
- Do you want to embrace a different area of technology?
- Do you want to manage a larger budget?
For candidates who value culture as their top “C,” Greiff recommends zeroing in on exactly what they want in a work culture — such as aspiring to work in a mission-based organization or a work environment where they’re empowered to make mistakes — rather than setting overly general goals.
Or perhaps compensation is your most important “C” — as may be the case for some executives who took time out of the workforce to raise children, care for aging parents, or take a sabbatical, and who want to catch up.
“It leads to a very different strategy, because if compensation is your number one, you’re OK with traveling every week, you’re OK with burning the midnight oil,” she said.
Since there’s no wrong answer to this personal preference discovery process, Greiff has found that this simple exercise helps older job hunters by alleviating pressure, uncovering trade-offs, and turning a shell game of what-ifs and should-haves into a reliable GPS.
Offer solutions to problems employers have
Once your priorities have been set, you have to change gears.
Instead of making your job search just about your own needs, Greiff recommends that job seekers think about what problem they can solve for prospective employers.
The key to moving your needle as a job seeker, she believes, is balancing finding work you’re passionate about, according to your 3 C’s assessment, while being strategic about how to sell your value to potential employers.
This is particularly important to keep in mind in a climate of uncertainty, Greiff added. Telling a hiring manager, “What really moves me is the following…” isn’t nearly as impactful as people think it is. “To employers, this isn’t kumbaya,” she said. “This is serious, and they’re looking, in a period of uncertainty, to mitigate as many areas that point to risk as they possibly can.”
Hiring managers want to know who will solve their most urgent, expensive problems, Greiff said. “These problems have an uncanny ability to get fast-tracked — and if you’re offering something that isn’t urgent on the side of the decision-maker, your search will lag.”
She pushes all of her clients over 40 to answer one practical question — What urgent, expensive problem do you have the unfair edge to solve? — and coaches them to incorporate their answer into all of their networking, interviews, job-search materials, and thought leadership.
“Once you can articulate that, compensation stops looking like a cost and starts looking like ROI,” she said. “Suddenly, ‘too experienced’ turns into ‘exactly the edge we need.'”
Looking for ways to ease an employer’s pain can give the job-search boost older job seekers need
The bottom line, Greiff said, is that people who reframe their job search around an employer’s pain get hired, while those who don’t are in danger of slipping into long-term unemployment.
“When older job seekers target urgent, expensive problems, passion follows,” she said. “Companies don’t want dream-chasers; they want leaders who crush costly pain points.”
Do you have a story to share about being an older job seeker? Contact this editor, Jane Zhang, at janezhang@businessinsider.com.
