ITT: Good Recruitment for Older Workers: Understanding and improving recruitment language, imagery and messaging

Tender description

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 interested in commissioning a research team to help build our understanding of the kinds of language and imagery commonly used in recruitment messaging (including job advertisements, job descriptions etc.) that might display or reinforce bias against older applicants. This ITT follows on from our 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 and improving recruitment language, imagery and messaging (this ITT) -Understanding the recruitment landscape and system in the context of older applicants -Understanding the recruitment experience for older workers 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.