Too Old to Hire. Too Young to Retire.

Just how common is this getting now... someone loses their job at 58. A restructuring, nothing personal. They've got 30-odd years of experience, a decent track record and every intention of working for another decade. The government agrees. It has told them, in no uncertain terms, that their State Pension won't arrive until they're 67.

They start applying for jobs, and spend the next nine years finding out that employers decided their working life was over some time ago.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the increasingly bizarre relationship between age, experience and employability. Too young and you lack experience. Too old and you've got too much of it. Somewhere in the middle there's a brief window where employers consider you just right, and it seems to shrink every year.

This is the other half of that story. Governments are stretching working lives at one end while employers cut them short at the other. And nobody in charge seems remotely bothered about the people stranded in between.

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The goalposts keep moving

According to the OECD's Pensions at a Glance 2025, more than half of OECD countries have already legislated to raise their normal retirement ages. Denmark is heading for 74. Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden are heading for 70 or beyond.

In the UK, where I'm from, the State Pension age started rising from 66 to 67 in April 2026. In Singapore, where I now live, the statutory retirement age went up to 64 in July 2026, with re-employment now running to 69.

The justification never changes. We're living longer, populations are ageing, and the OECD expects 52 people aged 65 and over for every 100 of working age by 2050, up from 33 in 2025. Somebody has to pay for all that. Fair enough.

But at some point, governments decided that changing a number in some legislation was the same thing as people actually working longer. Those are two very different things, and the gap between them is where real people fall through.

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They can count the savings. Nobody's counting the cost.

In July 2026, the UK's Work and Pensions Committee reported that 57% of people were already out of paid work in the year before they reached State Pension age. Some of them retired comfortably. Plenty didn't. The Committee found that people with health problems, caring responsibilities or from poorer areas were the least likely to still be working, and the least likely to have the savings to survive the wait.

So for a lot of people, a higher pension age simply means one more year with no wage and no pension.

Meanwhile, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that the move from 66 to 67 will cut government borrowing by around £10.5 billion in 2029-30.

That number was calculated to the decimal point. Now go and find the government's estimate for the 59-year-old burning through their savings applying for jobs nobody will give them. Or the former finance director stacking shelves on a fraction of their old salary. Or the perfectly capable 61-year-old whose application was quietly binned by someone who did the maths on their graduation year.

You won't find it.

The savings land neatly in the Treasury's spreadsheet. The cost gets dumped on the welfare budget, the health service, families and, above all, the people themselves.

And the government's grand answer? Its response to the Committee, published on 22 October 2026, offered employment support for over-50s, jobcentre advisers and more pension reviews. Help with your CV, essentially. Brilliant. A beautifully polished CV is no use to anyone when the employer reading it has already decided you're too old.

Keeping people is easy. Hiring them is the test.

To its credit, Singapore has gone further than most. Under the Retirement and Re-employment Act, employers must offer re-employment to eligible staff up to 69, and the Senior Employment Credit helps cover the wages of older workers.

But read the small print. Those protections apply to people who already have a job. Being kept on at 65 by a company you've served for 20 years is one thing. Walking in cold at 58, after a redundancy, and asking a stranger to take a chance on you is something else entirely.

An employer that happily re-employs its own 65-year-olds can still bin the CV of an equally experienced 58-year-old it's never met. Re-employment rules keep people in their seats. They do nothing for anyone who's already lost theirs.

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From the boardroom to clearing trays

Walk through any food court in Singapore and you'll see older people clearing tables, mopping floors and manning the tray returns. Some of them are there by choice. I'd love to know how many.

Because I'd bet a fair few of them used to run something. A finance team, an engineering project, a regional sales operation. Then came a restructuring at 57, a few hundred applications, a few dozen "we've decided to go with another candidate", and eventually a job paying a fraction of what they used to earn, doing work that uses none of what they spent 30 years learning.

I've had these conversations with enough taxi drivers to know that many of them once had illustrious careers.

All of this while the same employers moan endlessly about talent shortages, skills gaps and a lack of experienced leaders. It annoys the hell out of me. Far too many so-called HR leaders bemoan being desperately short of experience, but the companies they work for also happily use machines to screen that very experience out.

It's a staggering waste of talent. And it makes a mockery of every ministerial speech about productivity.

The data says what everyone over 50 already knows

The OECD Employment Outlook 2025 spells it out. Older workers are less likely to lose their jobs, but once they do, they're more likely to stay out of work for a long time. Experimental studies show older applicants with comparable credentials get fewer invitations to interview.

Same CV. Fewer interviews. There's a word for that, and most of the countries now telling people to work until 67 have laws against it.

Your inclusion strategy has an age limit

This is where it lands on the EBN doorstep. Plenty of employers love to celebrate their multigenerational workforce. The careers site has the inclusion pledge, the diversity page and the obligatory photo of a silver-haired colleague laughing in a meeting. Meanwhile, the hiring process filters out anyone who graduated before 1990 (or increasingly more like 2000).

The excuses are as tired as they are predictable. Too expensive. Won't adapt. Doesn't get technology. Overqualified. Will get bored. Every one of those is a question you can ask in an interview. Instead, employers are using them to make sure the interview never happens.

If your inclusion commitments come with an age limit, print it on the careers page. Or fix your hiring.

... see EBN's suggestions for reforming the recruitment market here.

Possible versus necessary

There's a world of difference between making it possible for people to work longer and making it necessary. The first takes jobs, fair hiring and employers prepared to look past a birth year. The second takes a vote in parliament.

Governments have done the easy bit and banked the savings. Employers have carried on exactly as before. And the people caught in the middle are being told to wait longer for their pension by a system that won't give them a job.

You can't tell people they're too young to retire, then stand back while employers tell them they're too old to hire. Pick one.

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