Find a Stable Employee : Hire a Senior - Senior Workers Add Value to Your Work Team

When you are looking for new help where do you find the kind of employee who will share your business goals with you? Have you considered hiring a senior?

These days, there are many seniors who still want, or need, to work. First, let's look at what seniors bring to the table, then what motivates them to work past retirement, and along the way we'll see how hiring a senior benefits both your business and the older worker.

1. What can the senior bring to your business?

The mature worker should come complete with a built-in knowledge of how to get along with others. Through years of life training, most seniors have had their rough edges polished to a fine degree of cooperative sensibility.

Work experience is far more than merely having held down a job and staying out of trouble. The mature worker has learned to think bigger, as in:

- what is best for the whole team?

- how does my part of the job support the whole effort?

- exactly how can I help us improve "our" business?

As well, a senior is inclined to measure himself by the success of the team, and is more willing to share the pain along with the accolades. He tends to seek peer approval through the quality of his work.

Certainly, the long term may not be so terribly many years for someone in his sixties. Then again, how many 20-year-olds have cycled through your payroll lately?

Since this will likely be his twilight working years, your senior has no urgent need to win advancement, or to harbour hidden agendas. All he is out to prove is that he can still hold up his end.

The older person will need some flexibility for illness, health care appointments, and of course time off for sudden family emergencies. As do young parents.

Your retired helper may not require health insurance or costly retirement plans. (Already been there, got that.)

Many seniors want only part-time work. So hire two seniors! Let them share one job; they can cover for each other's days off, and two heads are better than one!

2. Why would any senior want to keep working?

Jobs disappear after a company down-sizes, or merges; the more fortunate employees receive buy-outs. The others do not. Seniors in both categories are looking for useful employment, for all manner of reasons.

Some people grab that early retirement package because it's an opportunity to try something new. Ever heard of Burn-out?

Teachers (who tend toward early retirement) work part-time stocking grocery shelves and as lonely truckers; retired technicians become happy night watchmen; ex-policemen custom build furniture or operate heavy equipment. Many seniors have designed their own websites. They are still people, after all.

Often, a recently retired person is simply bored, misses the responsibility, the structure and the routine of having a job. It's not all that easy to break a 40-year habit!

Others, without adequate pensions and savings, seriously need the income.

Given the choice, most mature people will work only for someone where there is a feeling of compatibility and mutual respect.

3. Reward loyalty!

Psychologist Abraham Maslow is remembered for his Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid. This illustrates how, as human beings meet the basic requirements of existence -- food, clothing, shelter -- they will need greater social inter-action, personal development and respect. These higher needs make themselves felt as a person fulfills the more basic needs.

The perceptive employer is able to satisfy many of his people's social needs to the advantage of the social environment within his company organisation.

Share the load, the praise, and the rewards, along with the risks and the burdens. The older worker will repay you with his ingrained trait of loyalty. Next time, hire a senior!

Steve Williams is a former technologist and technical writer. Retired now, Steve edits a noncommercial website: http://www.writing4seniors.org

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