Women workers aged 50 and over are the most engaged group in the Swiss labour market, yet they are recruited the least. This is the paradox revealed by a representative study conducted by swissstaffing and gfs-zürich.
The fact: people aged 50 and over show the highest level of motivation at work among all age groups, with 63% saying they go beyond what is expected of them, well ahead of 18–29-year-olds (45%) and 30–49-year-olds (55%). Among women in this age group, the higher engagement rate rises to 70%.
For recruiters, this figure challenges a still widespread assumption: that motivation declines with age. For senior candidates, it is a concrete point to raise in an interview, beyond experience: measured engagement, not merely perceived engagement.
The problem is therefore not motivation, but access. More than 200,000 inactive people aged 50 and over, 62% of them women, represent Switzerland’s largest pool of available labour, even as companies struggle to recruit for occupations facing shortages.
This week: if you are recruiting, remove any implicit age limits from your job advertisements (“young dynamic team”, “for a role with progression over 10 years”) and test a flexible part-time interview format to broaden your talent pool. If you are job hunting and aged 50 or over, include this engagement figure in your interview pitch: it turns a question about age into an argument for reliability.
LinkedIn post idea to adapt
“I am still asked whether I can ‘keep up the pace’. A Swiss study has just answered for me: people aged 50 and over are the most engaged group in the labour market, ahead of 30–49-year-olds and 18–29-year-olds. The real question is not our motivation. It is your access to this talent pool.”