ITT: Good Recruitment for Older Workers: Understanding the recruitment experience of older workers

We know from our previous work that perceived age-bias is quite common in the recruitment process, with our own polling showing that nearly a third of people aged over 50 feel they have been turned down for a job because of their age. Age-related stereotypes - sometimes negative, sometimes positive - abound and can affect people's attitudes and behaviour, but we do not have enough evidence directly linking stereotypes to hiring decisions, or very much evidence on promising approaches to overcoming age-bias and discrimination in the recruitment process.

For this Invitation to Tender we are looking to commission research to help build our understanding of how older workers experience the recruitment process.

This ITT follows on from previous evidence work and is one of three projects we are commissioning in 2020 on the topic of reducing recruitment bias against older workers. The three projects are:

-Understanding the recruitment experience for older workers (this ITT)

-Understanding the recruitment landscape and system in the context of older applicants

-Understanding and improving recruitment language, imagery and messaging

We are happy for bidders to bid for multiple Invitations to Tender, but we will evaluate each bid based on its own individual merit.

Taken together, the three projects commissioned through these ITTs will feed into a broader two-year programme of work developing, testing and communicating new and improved recruitment approaches directly with employers and recruitment organisations. We plan to tender for this broader phase of work in the latter half of 2020. As such, the outputs from this piece of work should be geared towards directly supporting the developing, testing and communicating phase.

Deadline for tender submissions is 5pm on Monday, 17 February 2020.