In 2005, a client gave me a job brief with three lines on it.
Chinese. Male. Below 35.
I filled it without asking a single question. I ran a recruitment firm for about ten years, and in the early days that kind of brief was normal. The client paid, so we delivered, and a lot of perfectly good 50-year-olds never made it past my desk.
It tapered off as the rules changed, but the thinking behind it never really left. So I made a video about it, and it’s the most uncomfortable one I’ve filmed.
Here’s the short version, plus one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about after filming.
The numbers got worse this year
On 21 October, CNA reported a Tsao Foundation survey where close to 1 in 2 people aged 51 to 64 said they’d been passed over for jobs they were qualified for because of their age.
MOM’s own data backs up the feeling. Among retrenched workers in their 50s, the share back at work within six months fell from 51.8% to 41.9% between the first and second quarter of 2026. The job market is weak for everyone, but the gap between older workers and everyone else widened from about 9 points to 13.
Meanwhile, since July, the retirement age is 64 and you can be re-employed until 69. So the official position is that you can work till 69. The market’s position is that it would rather not hire you at 52.
Why we do it
From the inside, I’d say it comes down to habit, money and fear.
The habit part is almost embarrassing. Nobody I worked with could explain why middle managers had to be a certain age. It got passed down like the office fax cover sheet. When the fair-hiring guidelines arrived in 2007, the briefs stopped saying “below 35” and started saying “must be able to carry heavy items” instead. Same filter, nicer font.
The money part is seniority pay. By 52 your salary has been climbing for 25 years, so you look expensive before anyone reads past the first line of your CV.
The fear part is where I have to put my hand up. Years ago I hired a woman in her 50s to do admin, and on her first day she didn’t know how to turn on the computer. For years after that, she was my mental picture of every 50-year-old. Psychologists call it the availability heuristic. I call it letting one bad Monday decide a whole age group.
The uncomfortable bit is that facts don’t seem to fix this. A European study gave 482 managers fake CVs, some with information that debunked age stereotypes. The older candidates still got marked down.
And every hiring manager filtering out 52-year-olds today will be 52 one day too. I never thought about that back when I was filling those briefs. Most of us don’t.
The rule that gives the game away
Here’s the part I can’t let go of.
If you’re a fresh grad, there’s a traineeship scheme called GRIT. The government pays 70% of your allowance so an employer can try you out for three to six months.
If you’re 52 and retrenched, there’s help too. Career Conversion Programmes fund employers up to 90% of your salary if you’re 40 and above. The money is generous. The condition is that you convert into a new career, and career conversion means starting near the bottom on a junior’s pay.
So the 22-year-old gets tried out, and the 52-year-old gets sent back to start.
That would be fine if 52-year-olds were 22-year-olds with grey hair. But the 22-year-old doesn’t have a 30-year housing loan running till 65, and the 52-year-old usually has kids in uni and parents getting older at the same time. We’re offering swimming lessons to someone holding a suitcase. The lessons are real lah, but the suitcase is the problem.
My suggestion
Fund a paid trial hire for retrenched 50-somethings. Three to six months, like GRIT, on close to what the role normally pays. The government covers part of the wage, the employer watches the person work, and the rest of the subsidy only comes if they keep the person on.
Will that work? The evidence on hiring subsidies is mixed. Singapore’s Jobs Growth Incentive only gave mature hiring a modest lift, and Germany’s older-worker subsidies mostly paid for hires that would have happened anyway. But that European study suggests the one thing that does move managers is seeing the person do the job. A trial is built around exactly that, and the staged payment is there to stop us paying for hires that were coming anyway.
In the video I go further: the coded lines still showing up in job ads, four things I’d do if I were job hunting at 50-plus right now, and the story of a geothermal engineer who got into data analytics the hard way.
▶️ Watch the full video on YouTube
Then tell me in the comments there: should Singapore fund paid trial hires for retrenched 50-somethings? Yes or no, and why.
And if you’re over 50 and job hunting, I’d like to know the coded line you keep seeing in job ads. Some of them might end up in a follow-up.
