Some time ago I spoke to a technology recruiter who told me he wouldn’t dare proposing anyone over 40 to his clients.

The recruiter in question was well past this particular age and shamefaced, but he said clients just don’t want to see older faces waiting outside the interview room.

Information technology companies and users appear to be among the worst offenders for this, closely followed by public relations, media and telecom companies. However in some ways they are just more honest and upfront about their prejudices. Age discrimination is not restricted to these industries, you’ll find it just about everywhere, I know of one person applying to work in a department store being turned down for being too old. She was in her 40s.

Before going any further, I should disclose that I personally passed the big five-zero barrier a few months ago. I’m not complaining about my circumstances, as far as I know, most editors don’t care much about the age of their freelance journalists – in my business other factors matter.

However, I am concerned about the feedback I get from people of a similar age who read my writing on the subject.

It’s worth putting this invisible age barrier into some kind of meaningful context. People my age are not old. While those of us who have just passed 50 might have been alive in the 1960s and probably can hum more than a dozen Beatles tunes, I didn’t come of age until after the Sex Pistols and the Clash appeared on the scene. One of my first printed stories was an interview with The Stranglers.

Admittedly my early years in journalism were spent hammering on a manual typewriter, but my first paying job was on an already established personal computer magazine. And yes, it is true that the last time I looked at a line of programming code, it was written in Pascal.

On the other hand, I should point out I’m a good four years younger than Bill Gates – does anyone out there regard him as over the hill?

Maybe they do. After all, he has retired. And the people recruiting staff for Microsoft probably would almost certainly regard Mr Gates as too old for employment.

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Cruel, unpleasant, short-sighted, wasteful and stupid are just some of the words describing the attitude of many employers towards hiring older knowledge workers.

I’ve used the word ‘older’ in the opening sentence, but in reality, the age threshold we’re talking about here is barely middle aged. Put it this way, if you’ve been around long enough to remember where the headline on this story originally came from then you’d better watch out because by many recruiters’ standards you are already over the hill.

Over the years I’ve spoken to or been in email communications with workers, employers and recruiters who believe that anyone over the age of 40 is going to find the going hard when looking for a job in most knowledge-based industries.

This gives the lie to all that fancy talk we hear about the value of experience. At the point in their life when a knowledge worker has just about built up enough personal experience to know what they are doing, they drop off the employers’ wish list.

While the much talked about skills shortage of recent years is no longer regarded as a pressing issue, you have to ask yourself what was going on when employers bemoaned the lack of trained workers and at the same time refused to consider anyone with grey hair.

Some older workers complain they didn’t get interviews or replies to their enquiries about vacancies even at the height of the skills shortage. At the same time I heard from freshly minted graduates who couldn’t through the door. That sets the age limits for desirable recruits at roughly between 25 and 40 – a rather small percentage of most people’s productive working lives.

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