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Silicon Valley--long famous for young, hard-driving engineers and brash entrepreneurs--is becoming friendlier to over-50 workers.
Valerie Frederickson, a Silicon Valley recruiter who specializes in placing human resource executives, estimates that 18 or the past 25 people her company has placed were older than 50, and that she is now finding jobs for more than twice as many over-50 applicants as she was 12 months ago.
To the extent that Silicon Valley's tech companies are taking a harder look at older job applicants, recruiters say they are being prodded by a tighter job market. Some recruiters say a recent surge in hiring at big companies like Google is absorbing talent, making smaller companies hungry for skilled workers of any age.
Other recruiters say that, although Silicon Valley companies would still prefer to hire workers in their 30s or 40s, many of those people left the industry or the state when the tech-investment bubble collapsed in the early 2000s, eliminating more than 200,000 jobs in the region.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2006
