Job Search: The Special Case of Mature-Aged Job Seekers

Abstract

Throughout their career, most people engage in job search to find employment. Most of these people will agree that job search is a demanding and often demotivating process that challenges job seekers' self-regulation and requires a high level of perseverance over a long period of time (Nonnis et al., 2023; van Hooft et al., 2020). However, job search is not the same for everyone and the individual experiences and its success depend on various factors. One distinguishing feature is the age of the job seeker. Despite, after losing their job, mature-aged job seekers (i.e., job seekers over the age of 40) need longer (than younger people) to find reemployment again (Wanberg et al., 2016). Furthermore, they often face stereotypes and discrimination (Posthuma & Campion, 2009), which makes it even more difficult for them to bring their skills, knowledge and competence back into the workplace. However, not only mature-aged job seekers suffer from their job loss; it is also a problem for organizations, as (1) they lack skilled workers, and (2) as soon as mature-aged workers lose their job, they take this knowledge with them; often before they could share it with their colleagues (Burmeister & Deller, 2016; Fasbender & Gerpott, 2021, 2022). Paradoxically, organizations and mature-aged job seekers seem to struggle to find each other despite their aligned interests. Even society suffers from financial pressures placed on the social security system, as unemployed or early retirees not only receive social benefits but society is simultaneously missing their income tax (Fasbender et al., 2022; Wöhrmann et al., 2017). Bringing mature-aged job seekers back to employment and extending their working lives can help to solve the aforementioned problems. However, little knowledge and empirical results exist about mature-aged job seekers’ job search. As the process of aging is overarching one’s whole life, it inevitably overlaps with the process of job search. Therefore, taking a lifespan development perspective could provide valuable insights into mature-aged job seekers’ job search process (Fasbender & Klehe, 2019). However, models which consider age or age relevant constructs (e.g., aging strategies, or occupational future time perspective) have mostly been discussed conceptually (Fasbender & Klehe, 2019; Klehe et al., 2018). Furthermore, in the past, job search research has studied mainly quantitative variables such as job search intensity to measure job search and predict employment success. As job search quantity fails to predict employment quality, recent research argues for extending this framework by studying more self-regulatory frameworks and job search quality (van Hooft et al., 2020; van Hooft et al., 2013). Job search quality can be divided in four self-regulatory phases that intermittently relate to each other: (1) goal establishment, (2) planning of goal pursuit, (3) goal pursuit, and (4) reflection (van Hooft et al., 2013). This dissertation sheds light on mature-aged job seekers’ job search by testing parts of the conceptual model by Fasbender and Klehe (2019), which not only focuses on job search quality but also highlights the importance of aging when looking at mature-aged job seekers’ job search process. I did so in three ways. First, I looked at elements of self-regulated job search such as goal establishment, goal pursuit, and career exploration. Second, I studied several aging related constructs. Thereby, I introduced so-called aging strategies (elective selection, loss-based selection, optimization, and compensation; SOC strategies) into job search, and studied occupational future time perspective (i.e., the extent to which one's remaining future time and opportunities in the work context are perceived as limited rather than open; Zacher & Frese, 2009), and considered the possibility that mature-aged job seekers might prefer to move into retirement instead of continuing the search. Third, I studied boundary conditions such as age and reemployment efficacy (i.e., mature-aged job seekers’ confidence to find a new job (Wanberg et al., 2010) to figure out for whom my findings work. As the job search process is not shaped by the job seeker alone but also by the context in which it takes place as well as the interaction of these two (Baruch & Rousseau, 2019), I further studied age discrimination. Therewith, I looked at the potentially constraining context in which mature-aged job seekers look for a job. Taken together, this dissertation includes two studies.