Hiring Senior Citizens Part-Time Makes Good Business Sense

Kate Supino

May 25, 2015

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When thinking about the general labor pool for your small business needs, it's shockingly easy to overlook over 14% of the population.

According to the latest Census Bureau reports, that amount of the U.S. population is over 65, and thus considered a senior citizen.

If you're not considering hiring a senior citizen for your small business needs, you may want to think twice about it.

What Seniors Bring to the Table

Senior citizens have a lot to offer small business owners.

They generally have a long history of work experience from which to draw upon.

Senior citizen's work experience is often disregarded by some people, since most of it would have been pre-computer age and pre-Internet age. However, the rules of business are universal and evergreen.

What seasoned and experienced seniors know about business still holds true today, from lemonade stands all the way up mega corporations.

How to Use Seniors in Your Small Business

When hiring senior citizens for your small business, you do have to remember that they will have special needs that you'll need to take into account.

If you read the following article “7 Tips for Getting a Great Part-Time Job in Retirement," you'll get a better sense of what senior citizens are looking for in a part-time job.

Some appropriate jobs for seniors in your small business would be:

Telephone support - having them answer and route calls;
Sales calls - having them make cold calls to garner more leads and sales for you;
Packing and mailing - having them box products, label them and bring them to the post office;
Delivery - having them deliver your product to the doors of your customers.

Intangible Benefits of Hiring a Senior

It can be said that senior citizens are generally more reliable and dependable than a teenager.

An experienced senior citizen understands how important it is for them to arrive on time, call if they're delayed, and to follow through on tasks.

They also are more inclined to find something else to do if they run out of work, and not stand around like a teenager might; waiting for you to give them their next assignment.

Another intangible benefit of hiring senior citizens for your small business is the goodwill that you're putting forth into the world.

The bad economy negatively impacted many senior's retirement accounts, and there are too many hard-working seniors out there without enough money to live on.

When you offer part-time employment to this sector of the population, you're helping someone's life get a little easier.

That should be reason enough to consider hiring a senior citizen for your small business.