How to Get a Job After 50: Practical Advice That Actually Works

What the Law Gives You Before You Are Even Hired

Age is one of the nine protected characteristics in the Equality Act 2010. Section 5 defines an age group as "a group of persons defined by reference to age, whether by reference to a particular age or to a range of ages" — so "over 50" is a group the Act recognises, not only a specific birthday.

The part that matters most to a jobseeker is section 39(1): an employer "must not discriminate against a person (B) — (a) in the arrangements A makes for deciding to whom to offer employment". The protection starts at the advert, not at the contract.

Section 13(1) defines direct discrimination: treating someone "less favourably" because of a protected characteristic. Section 13(2) adds the exception that applies only to age — an employer does not discriminate "if A can show A's treatment of B to be a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim". Age is the one characteristic where a direct age requirement can be defended, and the burden of showing it sits with the employer.

Acas puts the recruitment rules in plain terms. Employers "must not allow decisions about recruitment to be influenced by a job applicant's age"; "job adverts should detail the requirements for the job and applicants must be assessed objectively and equally"; and at interview, "you must not ask different questions depending on the applicant's age", with "How would you feel about managing people older than yourself?" given as the example.

On adverts specifically, Acas warns employers that "'recent graduate' or 'highly experienced' – these can discriminate against age", and that an employer "must be able to prove you have a good reason for any job requirement in your advert". Acas's own worked example of indirect age discrimination is an employer advertising for a "recent graduate": the rule applies to everyone, but recent graduates are likely to be younger, so older workers are disadvantaged by it.

One limit to know in advance. Acas is equally clear that "employers do not have to explain their reasons for rejecting job applications" and do not have to give feedback. Silence is not evidence of anything. What you can do is ask.

If an Advert or an Interview Crossed the Line

Most articles for over-50s stop at "ageism is illegal". Here is the actual sequence, in the order I would do it.

1. Write it down the same day, and screenshot the advert. Adverts get edited and taken down. Record the wording, the date it was posted, who interviewed you, and the questions as closely as you can recall them.
2. Ask the employer to explain. Acas says a rejected applicant can ask the employer to explain their decision and share any rules they have, such as a recruitment policy. They can decline. The request and the answer are both useful either way.
3. Raise it with the organisation first. GOV.UK's route is to complain directly to the person or organisation before anything formal.
4. Get advice from someone who does this daily. GOV.UK names the Equality Advisory and Support Service, and points employees to Acas, Citizens Advice or a trade union representative.
5. Mind the clock. A tribunal claim is usually due within three months of the problem happening, you need an Acas early conciliation certificate for each respondent before you lodge it, and there is no fee to make a claim.

Step two is the one people skip, because they do not know what to write. Here is a complete example with fictional names — the applicant is Gerald Okonjo, the hiring manager is Mr Halliwell.

Send it from an address you will keep, and save a copy. If the reply is unsatisfactory, those two emails are the first documents in anything that follows — and the three-month clock is already running.

What the Numbers Say About the Market You Are In

The Department for Work and Pensions publishes an annual series on older workers. Its Economic labour market status of individuals aged 50 and over, trends over time: September 2025 release reports that the employment rate for people aged 50 to 64 rose 0.7 percentage points to 71.6% in 2025, and that the employment rate gap against people aged 35 to 49 was 14.1 percentage points in 2025, against 14.2 in 2024.

The same release records the average age of exit from the labour market in 2025 at 65.8 years for men and 64.7 years for women, both the highest levels recorded on ONS data.

Two things follow. The gap is real, so the difficulty you are experiencing is not imaginary or a personal failure of technique. And people are leaving work later than at any point in the series, which means a CV in your fifties is not an end-of-career document — on those exit ages you may have another decade and a half of working life to plan for.

My Position: Stop Trying to Hide Your Age

The standard list — delete the graduation year, cut everything before 2010, change your email provider, never say "30 years" — is sold as CV hygiene. Most of it is concealment, and I would not do it, for three reasons.

It does not hold. Your dates are on LinkedIn, on professional registers, and in the reference: GOV.UK notes that a reference "can be brief – such as job title, salary and when you were employed", so employment dates reach the employer at offer stage whatever your CV says.

It changes how you sit in the interview. A candidate who has spent a fortnight sanding the dates off a document walks in braced for the subject to come up. That posture is more visible than a graduation year.

It removes the evidence. If an employer's real reason is your age, the advert wording, the interview questions and the timeline are what you would need. Concealment gives you a worse application and a thinner record.

What I would do instead is cut for relevance and be open that this is what I have done. Ten to fifteen years in full, with dates. Earlier roles condensed to one line of titles and employers where they add something to this application. The graduation year stays — removing a single date from a document made of dates draws the eye rather than deflecting it. The email provider is not worth ten minutes of anyone's evening; nobody has ever been shortlisted on their mail domain.

And if a job description asks for "total years of experience", answer it accurately. It is a question you are allowed to be asked, and a hedged answer is worse than a plain one.

Where the Effort Is Better Spent

In the order I would work through them.

• •
  Apply only where you meet every essential criterion. Desirable criteria are optional; essential ones are not. This is the cheapest correction available and it is where untargeted searches lose most of their time — see how to find where your applications are stalling.
• •
  Go where depth is hard to replace. A role that someone with five years could fill is a role where your fifteen buys you nothing and costs the employer more. A role built on a regulatory regime, a sector, or a set of relationships that take a decade to build is the opposite.
• •
  Name your tools, by name and version of use. "Proficient in Microsoft Office" is what everyone writes. "Excel (Power Query, pivot tables), Salesforce, Asana, Power BI" is a fact that removes an assumption before anyone has formed it.
• •
  Tailor each application rather than each CV template. A long career means a large body of material to select from, which is an advantage only when you select. Tailoring to the job description covers the mechanics, and ATS-friendly formatting covers what actually breaks when software reads your file — which is parsing, not a secret age filter.
• •
  Use the people you already know, specifically. "Let me know if you hear of anything" produces nothing. "I am looking for a quality manager role in food manufacturing within an hour of Leeds, and I can start in four weeks" is something a former colleague can act on.
• •
  Ask for the hours you want, openly. GOV.UK confirms that "all employees have the legal right to request flexible working" and that "employees can make a request for flexible working from their first day in a job"; an employer "can refuse an application if they have a good business reason for doing so". Four days is a request you can make in week one, not a secret you have to keep through the interview.

There is also named public support, which most guides for over-50s never mention. GOV.UK's JobHelp pages for finding work at 50 plus point to 50 PLUS: Choices, which gives "tailored employment and skills support" through a work coach if you claim Universal Credit, and to the Digital Midlife MOT for taking "stock of your work, health and money with future planning in mind". The same page lists "free and flexible courses available, including apprenticeships, Skills Bootcamps and Sector-based Work Academy Programmes", and the Find a Job service for vacancy alerts.

If the direction itself is changing rather than the employer, writing a CV for a career change is the relevant guide — the problem there is translation, not age.

The Two Conversations That Come Up

"Aren't you overqualified for this?"

Agree that it looks that way, say in one sentence what you want from the next few years, and tie it to something specific in the advert. Short beats thorough here. Applying when you are overqualified has the full answer, a complete worked cover letter, and the reason I would not shrink your job titles to avoid the question.

"We're not sure the salary will work for you."

Settle it before they have to raise it. An employer who does not know whether you will accept the band will hesitate, and hesitation at offer stage usually becomes a no. If the range works for you, say so plainly and move the conversation back to the work.

Neither answer requires you to discuss your age, and I would not volunteer it. If someone else raises it — as an assumption about energy, retirement plans, or reporting to a younger manager — answer the work question underneath it, and write down what was said afterwards.

Experience as Evidence, Not as an Apology

The pattern that does the most damage in interviews is over-explaining: a long preamble about how you know the role is a step down, offered before anyone has raised it. It tells the interviewer that you expect to be a problem.

Experience persuades when it is specific. Not "I bring a lot of experience" but "the last time a supplier failed an audit at this scale, the recovery took nine weeks and the expensive mistake was re-auditing before fixing the paperwork — I would sequence it the other way." That is an answer a candidate with five years cannot give, and it is doing work for the employer inside the interview rather than promising to do it later.

Prepare three of those, matched to the three things the advert says it cares about most. They are more use than any amount of CV cosmetics.

Sources

• Equality Act 2010, section 5: Age
• Equality Act 2010, section 13: Direct discrimination
• Equality Act 2010, section 39: Employees and applicants
• Acas: Types of age discrimination
• Acas: Preventing age discrimination
• Acas: Advertising a job
• Acas: Being rejected or told not to apply for a job
• Acas: If you're discriminated against when applying for a job
• GOV.UK: Discrimination — what you can do
• GOV.UK: Make a claim to an employment tribunal
• GOV.UK: Work references
• GOV.UK: Flexible working
• GOV.UK JobHelp: Finding work at 50 plus
• DWP: Economic labour market status of individuals aged 50 and over, trends over time — September 2025