The in-betweeners

Workingwise.co.uk’s readership is both HR workers and jobseekers. Dom Mellonie has seen things from both sides. He has had a long career in HR, most recently as Chief People Officer at Purplebricks/Strike, and is currently looking for his next permanent role.

Dom says he feels ‘quite conflicted’ about the problems he has faced when it comes to finding a job. “I have benefited for 30 years in HR from being a white male in terms of the opportunities I have been offered, so maybe this is payback to a certain degree,” he says. However, he has definitely got the sense from his fellow ‘in-betweeners’ who are 50+ that they are being overlooked for work in favour of younger people. He recently wrote an article on LinkedIn about age discrimination just “to be provocative”, asking whether HR is ageist and whether the balance between experience and what he calls ‘youthful exuberance’ is right.

He says it is important to get a good mix of generations in many industries. For instance, in travel, which he has worked in, it’s just as important to do the ‘sexy, exciting’ stuff that might appeal to younger people as it is to promote adjoining family rooms for older travellers. For him it’s not just about age balance when it comes to staffing, but also about having a wider customer reach.

He thinks there are various reasons why employers might not want older people – one is the belief that they will want to do a job in a certain way or that they might be difficult to manage, particularly for managers who are younger than them. He admits that older people also have biases against younger colleagues. He says: “Ageism is the last bastion of discrimination.”

Longer working lives

Dom, who is 57, intends to work for at least 10 more years. He says more and more people are working later because they need or want to and they require a broad variety of roles at all levels that draw on their experience and emotional intelligence. He recalls, for instance, the passion of an 83-year-old who he worked with in a motorsport organisation during Covid.

Dom has been looking for jobs for the last two months and each time he has lost out at interview to a younger woman. He is all for that and he is really pleased that his successor at Purplebricks is a brilliant black woman, but he remarks that it is fairly easy to change the statistics quickly in HR, but harder to make a difference in other areas of businesses, such as in the Chief Financial Officer role. He also acknowledges that managing an increasingly multigenerational workforce is difficult.

Nevertheless, he also believes that it is important that older people are not being excluded because of their age. “I can see both sides,” he says, “from the employer and candidate perspective.”

Dom, who has just got an interim position, will be writing about this and about his jobseeking experience for workingwise.co.uk over the coming weeks.

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