More Retirees returning to Work
Brett Favre may be the most famous un-retire-er, but he’s not alone. The killer combo of bigger-than-expected bills and smaller-than-expected nest eggs is sending a steady stream of retirees back to work. They’re driven less by the need for entertainment and identity than they are by the need for another month’s rent check.
Judging by the traffic at his Web site RetirementJobs.com, research director Robert Skladany says the number of people who were already retired and now are back out in the labor market looking for jobs has roughly doubled in a year.
There are also a growing number of job seekers who are over 50 and unemployed but don’t consider themselves retired, and of older workers who still are working but have delayed their retirement dates as they’ve watched the values of their 401(k) accounts drop. Current workers between the ages of 55 and 70 expect to keep working until they are 70, and workers over the age of 66 expect to keep working until they are 76, according to a new study by insurance giant MetLife.
But those workers face an inhospitable job market. “[There's] a disconnect between those in their late 50s and 60s who aspire to continue working and the realities of a job market that tends to treat many older job candidates as, at best, irrelevant,” the MetLife study concludes. It’s no surprise that the job market is weak—nationally, there are six people looking for work for every unfilled job out there. But for older workers, the outlook is much, much worse. It takes older job seekers roughly seven and a half months to find a new job, compared with six months for younger workers, according to Labor Department figures. At Senior Job Bank, another Web site focused on matching workers with jobs, there are 100 would-be employees browsing for every job that is posted, according to publisher Gene Burnard.
And the geographic outlook doesn’t help. Florida, California, Arizona, North Carolina—all of those places where retirees move to enjoy the warm weather—are experiencing higher-than-usual unemployment, says Skladany. The best job markets now are in Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, and North Dakota, which are not exactly hot retirement destinations.
I believe that those who making hiring decisions needs to look at those applicants who may be older, because of their range of experience and expertise. These workers are often less adverse to go looking for benefits that are more important to younger workers, like vacation time, and 401 (k) plans. Instead, they may look for a part time job or a job with flexible schedule, where they may not need to work 30-40 hours a week.
