The Response of Canadian Public and Private Sector Human Resource Professionals to the Challenge of the Aging Workforce

The purpose of the present study was to determine the extent to which organizations in the public and private sectors are actively engaging in human resource practices that promote the recruitment and retention of older employees. We specifically focused on human resource practices targeting managerial and professional employees aged 50 and older in Ontario, Canada. In 2001, the median age of Canada's population reached an all-time high of 37.6 years, compared with a median age of 25.4 years in 1966. The median age of the core working group (20 to 64) rose to 41.3 years, indicating that the working-age population is becoming more dominated by older individuals. (1) It is forecast that the 55- to 64-year-old age group will increase by more than 50 percent over the next 10 years, reflecting the entrance of baby boomers into this group, and that the population aged 45 to 64 will represent 48 percent of the working-age population by 2015. (2) There are more individuals in the older age groups and fewer individuals in the younger age groups than ever before in the workplace. This has profound human resource implications. Organizations will have no choice but to employ and develop older workers more in the future) Instead of encouraging older employees to leave, organizations will need to devise innovative, proactive strategies to entice them to remain in the workforce. (4) The recruitment and retention of older employees will be a major challenge in this decade. However, most organizations are currently ill-prepared to meet this challenge. (5) The research on the responses of employers to the aging of the workforce is extremely limited. (6) This is especially the case for research on the responses of Canadian employers. Most Canadian research pertaining to older workers has been focused upon retirement (7) and not on the recruitment and retention of older people in the workforce. More than a decade ago, Towers Perrin (7) surveyed HR executives in 437 organizations across Canada regarding their concerns about the aging workforce and how they were dealing with, or preparing to deal with, the potential challenge of the aging workforce. Most HR executives were aware of and concerned about the demographic trends. However, close to two-thirds (64 percent) had not begun to address the problems of the aging workforce even though for a majority of these companies at least one-third of their workforce was over 40. Towers Perrin found that 93 percent of the companies had no special recruiting efforts directed towards older workers over the age of 50 or retirees, only seven percent had a full-scale or pilot program in place offering phased or gradual retirement, and only five percent had a full-scale or pilot program directed toward the retraining of older workers. The authors of this report concluded that most organizations were doing little to address the challenge of the aging workforce. More recently, in a survey of labor and management leaders focused on the replacement of retirees, the Canadian Labour and Business Centre (CLBC) (8) found that both labor and management are beginning to recognize the problem of the aging of the workforce and the need to take steps to address this issue. The CLBC found that the level of activity in addressing the replacement of retirees is highest in the public sector. And, large organizations were found to be more active in addressing this issue than small firms. The authors of the CLBC report concluded that "While the issue of an aging workforce is not in the centre of the radar screen it is most definitely in the viewfinder" (p. 1). Other evidence suggests that the recruitment and retention of older employees are not yet considered to be priority issues by employers. Schetagne (9) reported that when asked about future challenges in the labor market, only one focus group participant in 20 identified the aging of the workforce. According to Vu (10) organizations may say they want to hang onto older workers, but few are putting in place programs designed to encourage this to happen. …