Small businesses opt for older staff

Entrepreneurs are increasingly turning to older workers to help grow their businesses, because they feel that school leavers are just not up to the job, a recent survey has found.

More than a fifth of business owners questioned by the Tenon Forum, an independent think-tank, said they favoured hiring older workers rather than graduates as a solution to staffing problems.

A third said the lack of work readiness among graduates was a significant problem while 31 per cent said school leavers too often had poor literacy and numeracy skills.

About one fifth of the 148 employees at Pimlico Plumbers in London are aged over 50, including a 101-year-old who cleans the vans.

Charlie Mullins, the company’s founder, who hired a 66-year-old to be his PA, said he had been put off employing school leavers because of their general unreliability and complaints of poor workmanship from customers.

“I don’t believe that youngsters have the right attitude,” Mr Mullins said, adding that the problem has been made worse by the fact that most British school leavers have not known the hardship caused by a recession. “I have had too many problems with youngsters, the unreliability, the ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude. Every so often one comes in and I think ‘Blimey, he’s good’, but that is an exception,” he said.

The shift in employment practices has also been driven by demand, Mr Mullins said. “Our customers wanted an older person. We get them ringing up saying younger workers are not respectful.”

Pimlico Plumbers now asks for at least 10 years’ experience when advertising job vacancies. This used to mean that it only employed people over 30, although shortages in the labour market mean that it has had to drop this to 27, Mr Mullins said.

Tenon’s research found that three in 10 small and medium-sized businesses employ large numbers of people over 50.

A fifth of the companies said they hired older workers as mentors and coaches for younger employees and 12 per cent paid retired workers to be consultants.

Twenty-one per cent of those asked said they had been forced to increase their training budgets in order to tackle skills shortages among their staff.

Khalid Aziz, chairman of Aziz Corporation, a corporate leadership training business, said a third of his staff were over 40, in part because they tend to be better trained and offer greater loyalty to the company.

“We are becoming increasingly frustrated with a lack of work readiness among graduates, many of whom do not possess basic skills, such as mental arithmetic,” he said.

The lure for young people of higher wages in London is exacerbating the problem for smaller companies, which cannot afford to match salary levels with the capital, Mr Aziz said. “Big businesses offer graduate entry programmes and then bin a lot of the successful candidates within two years.

“But once they have been in that situation, expectations are raised. That makes it very difficult for a small business like ours to attract them.”