25 Companies Actively Hiring People Over 50 in the UK (Plus the Portfolio Career Strategy That Gets You Hired)

If you're over 50 and job hunting feels broken, it's not you. It's a systemic issue, but unlike most of the articles spreading doom and gloom, we want to liven things up, because the picture is not as bleak. With the right mindset and approach, the greatest opportunities appear.

Right now, there are employers from Amazon, to the NHS, to the Met Police who have all come to speak to our members about careers and opportunities within their organisations. Some have realised standard recruitment isn't reaching this talent pool, and they're doing something about it. Not age washing. These companies have turned up, spent time with our members and encouraged their applications. 

Below is a list of 25 of them - but before you scroll to the list: knowing who's hiring is only half the answer. The other half is how you approach them. That starts with rethinking what a "job" even means at this stage of your career.

Stop thinking about a job. Start thinking about jobssss

We encourage our members to stop thinking about a job and to think more about job layers - a portfolio built from several roles, each one smaller and more flexible, each one building skills, income and credibility in the direction you actually want to go.

Take Lisa. She spent years as a full-time corporate recruiter (Head of talent management roles at Apple and elsewhere). After a long period of being out of work, she now doesn't have one job. She has six. She's a part-time swimming instructor, she's pro bono network manager for a venture philanthropy organisation, she does the occasional executive search contract, she is a trustee at a charity, she delivers workshops for us at Brave Starts and, a few times a year, she works events (she's just finished three intense days at the Goodwood Revival Festival among them)! 

Six plates spinning is the modern definition of job security, because no single client, or employer can take everything away from her at once.

It's not just our members and their cohort. Take Kirsty, who is 24. I see her most mornings serving coffee at Gails. I asked her recently how her weekend was, since I hadn't seen her in over two days. 'Oh, I don't just work here - I also work as a yoga instructor'. 

66% of Gen Z reportedly have a side hustle (and the wider UK population is a surprising 46%)!

People who feel most secure right now aren't the ones who found the one perfect job. They're the ones who built a portfolio. In our own data based on 552 members, those who are self-employed and volunteering are notably more content than full-time employees and job-seekers (employment status was a statistically sharp dividing line).

Why "just apply for jobs" doesn't work for our members

By the time a role is advertised, it's already too late for many of our members. It lands in a hopper alongside hundreds of other highly qualified candidates, filtered by algorithms that were never designed with a 50+ career story in mind. (A fuller article exploring how recruitment is broken and why older applicants are giving up on it can be read here).

We think the jobs of tomorrow mostly don't exist yet as tidy job descriptions. Our members have the skills, the track record, and often the networks, to bring real value to organisations that need them but, if they compete purely through traditional applications, they get filtered out before a human ever reads their CV.

The currency that actually opens doors at this stage of your career isn't a perfectly formatted CV. It's trust. 

Trust is built through demonstrated competence, through time given, through value added before you ever ask for anything. That's what we teach our members to build, and it shows up in the numbers: our own data shows that members who come to us unemployed are significantly more likely to be in work over the longer term, because what we're really building is network, resilience, career confidence and clarity.‍

This isn't another "age-friendly employer" list

You've probably seen the lists before... the same handful of large, famous names that show up on every "best employers for older workers" ranking. Be careful with those. In our experience, the bigger and more publicly "age-friendly" the brand, the less likely they are to actually be recruiting people over 50 in any meaningful way (despite invites, they've not taken up the chance to engage with us anyway!)

Why? A few possibilities. Rising employment costs and the Employment Rights Act are making many large employers more cautious about hiring in general. I would then guess that the companies with the loudest public reputation on this topic may simply already be inundated with approaches....

Being proactive and creative is exactly the right strategy. It just needs to be aimed somewhere it can actually land. The list below is that: every organisation on it has shown up, in person, specifically to talk to our members about real opportunities. It's not exhaustive and, as this is a collection of those who've come to talk to our members over the past 2 years, it's likely some will no longer be looking. Take it as a starter for 10 i you like but, most importantly, take heart - there are opportunities out there, they are just quieter and less obvious.

The 25 companies who have actively been hiring people over 50

Every month, employers come and speak directly to our members, many of them because they know the value and experience this cohort can bring. A lot of what they share lives behind our member area because, let's be honest: we only charge £89 a year, and we can't give everything away for free. Doing so, does somewhat cannabalise our member value proposition which we work hard to build.

Here's who's been in front of our members over the past two years:

1. Now Foster — fostering is paid work, and for people who want to do something genuinely meaningful, helping keep siblings together and giving children a loving home is hard to beat.
2. Rathbones — recruiting into wealth management.
3. The Gym Group — retrains people and pays for their qualifications, for a minimum 12 paid hours a week across their 264 UK gyms, while you build your own Personal Trainer client base on the side.
4. Code Your Future — an outstanding charity that recruits directly from our membership.
5. Utility Warehouse — commission-based, not salaried, but a genuinely compelling proposition: if you can save people money on their household bills, you have a sellable product and can build your own pipeline.
6. Babcock International — their Train to Fit programme.
7. Citizens Advice — have come to speak to our members twice.
8. DCS Group — the UK's largest distributor of cleaning and household products.
9. FDM Group — their Returners Programme.
10. Rentokil — extensive retraining routes.
11. Carbon3 — a boutique consultancy.
12. Amazon — active recruiting.
13. Acorn Early Years Foundation — career changes into the early years sector.
14. Senior Response — a call centre specialising in products for the over-50 consumer.
15. The Met Police — what better way to serve your community?
16. Now Teach — moving into teaching.
17. The Probation Service — a genuinely interesting and underexplored route.
18. NAHL Group — legal sector roles.
19. VIA — mental health support worker roles.
20. Turner and Townsend - global programme managers and consultancy for large infrastructure projects
21. The NHS — their Volunteer to Career Pathway Programme.
22. The Wildlife Trusts — roles and volunteering across nature conservation, land management and education.
23. The Fore — matches experienced professionals with charities that need pro bono support across strategy, finance and communications.
24. Good Life Sorted — recruits local "Helpers" to support older and vulnerable people with everyday home tasks and companionship.
25. ILC-UK — the UK's leading think tank on longevity and ageing, and a route into policy, research and advisory work on the future of work.

That's not a list of theoretical "age-friendly employers." These are organisations that have shown up, in person, specifically to recruit from our community.

In addition to recruiting organisations, there are also all the amazing recruiters who come and share latest roles they are looking to fill, the experts who talk about things like NED roles, franchising, sweat equity and business start up skills. 

With plates to spin, we all need to be more entrepreneurial nowadays.

Lastly...

You don't need one perfect job to feel secure. You need a strategy and ideally a community that knows which doors are actually open, because they've walked through them with the people on the other side.

That's what Brave Starts exists to do. Sign up to Beyond Brave

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