How Do You Get Hired After 50? | Marcylle Combs

You have the experience. You also have the results, decades of them. And yet somewhere in the interview you can feel it anyway: the room is doing the math on your age. So how do you get hired after 50 when the people across the table are quietly wondering how long you plan to stay?

I hear this from my coaching clients more than I would like. Women in their fifties and sixties who are doing strong work, who want the next role, and who believe they are being passed over for one reason they are not allowed to say out loud. So I wanted to bring in someone who has sat on both sides of that table.

Marcylle Combs is a leadership expert, a speaker, and the author of Never Hire Your Friends, with the word Never crossed out on the cover. She founded and ran home health and hospice companies for decades, she has hired older workers since she was in her thirties, and she is past retirement age and still working. She also has a story about ageism that has nothing to do with a job, and everything to do with how this bias actually operates.

The Question They Are Not Allowed to Ask

I asked Marcylle whether ageism is really as widespread as my clients believe. Her answer came in two parts. First, employers are never supposed to discriminate by age. Second, everyone knows it happens.

I've even heard him say this in the boardroom. If they're 58, how long are they really gonna work?

Marcylle Combs

In fact, it has happened to her directly. Private equity investors asked her, point blank, how long she was planning on working. But she noticed the question was not really about her birthday. Instead, it was about their money. They had a key player and they wanted to know if she would stay.

That reframe matters, because once you hear the retirement question as a risk question, you know exactly what to do with it. Marcylle knew the answer they were hoping for, and she gave it to them.

I have no plans in retirement. I have a lot to give and I plan to be here doing this thing for a long time.

Marcylle Combs

When they ask how long you will work, they are not asking your age. They are asking about their risk. Answer the risk.

When the Room Decides You Are Too Old

Here is the part of our conversation I did not expect. Marcylle had breast cancer five years ago, at 66. She wanted a reconstruction that uses your own tissue, a long and demanding surgery. She is fit, active, and on almost no medication. And the first physician told her she was too old for it.

She did not argue. Instead, she went back to the endocrinologist who had treated her for years, and he was angry on her behalf. There are 45 year olds in such poor health they should never have that surgery, he told her, and 80 year olds who could have it without a second thought. So she switched doctors. As a result, the surgery and her recovery went without a problem.

If you get someone who makes those statements to you, you need to go to someone else.

Marcylle Combs

I want you to hold that sentence next to your job search. The bias is real, and it shows up in physicians' offices and boardrooms and interviews alike. Yet Marcylle's response to it was not to shrink or to prove herself to the person who had already decided. It was to take her experience somewhere it would be seen.

Not every room deserves your experience. Some of them you simply leave.

How Do You Get Hired After 50? Prepare Like the Most Talented Person in the Room

Marcylle was candid about the math. If you are older, she said, you are almost certainly arriving more talented than the other candidates. At the same time, the room may already be counting your age against you. In other words, you carry both things into the interview, so you present the talent. Here is how she does it, whether she is walking into a boardroom or advising a friend who is job hunting at 58.

They don't care what happened in 1980. They care about a current event that's happening now.

Marcylle Combs

Finally, one more from Marcylle that every candidate should hear, at any age. From the boss's perspective, you will never be as good in the job as you were in the interview. So make the interview the truest, sharpest version of you.

The Part Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

Marcylle asked forgiveness before she said this one, and then she said it anyway. Experience alone does not carry the first impression, because the people interviewing you do not know you. All they have is a resume and a face on a screen, and they decide fast.

I'm not saying it's fair. I'm just saying it's not reality.

Marcylle Combs

Her point is not about vanity. Rather, it is about alignment. If you are asking a company to bet on you for the next ten or fifteen years, everything they can see needs to agree with that story: how you dress, how you carry yourself, how up to date you look, how you talk about what is happening in the world right now. She has watched too many talented people walk in expecting their history to do the talking. It does not.

I added my own piece to this. Some of my clients have started stripping the dates off their resumes, hoping to hide their age from the applicant tracking system. I do not think that works, and I do not think the systems are rejecting people for their graduation year in the first place. Mostly, they are screening for qualifiers. The moment you are on camera, the interviewer will know roughly how old you are. So stop spending energy on hiding it, and spend that energy on the five steps above.

You cannot hide your age. You can absolutely control whether you read as current.

What You Bring That Nobody Has to Teach

Now the other side of the table, because Marcylle spent decades on it. She was hiring people in their sixties when she was 35, many of them finishing one career and starting another. She is clear eyed about the trade-offs. For example, some skills, computers then, AI now, may take an older hire a few more steps to learn. Likewise, some of these hires want three or four days a week, not five.

But listen to what she gets in return. They show up on time, even for a part time job that pays less than they used to make. Beyond that, they are courteous, and they know how to read who is in the room and adjust. None of that has to be trained. And then there is the thing most employers never think to ask for.

If you can humble yourself enough to ask their opinion, they might be able to give you a different take on a problem that they might not know the answer to.

Marcylle Combs

That is your case, right there. So when you sit across from a hiring manager, you are not asking for a courtesy. You are offering judgment they cannot buy anywhere else.

And if you are worried about the twenty-somethings you would be working beside, Marcylle has good news. In her experience, Gen Z actively wants to learn from older adults. In fact, they want to talk to their grandparents. They want to know what happened and how it felt. Her one instruction for a boomer or Gen Xer walking into that building: shock them with the fact that you know what ChatGPT is.

What I Want You to Take From This

Near the end, Marcylle told me what all of this comes down to for her as a leader.

My whole premise on this is about honor and honesty and humility and integrity as leaders.

Marcylle Combs

Those are the leaders worth working for at any age, and they are out there. Therefore your job is to find them, walk in prepared, and let them see what thirty years actually looks like.

One more thing, because it is the part I care about most. Getting into the room after 50 is one skill. Being recognized once you are in it, however, is another. That is the Articulation Gap, the distance between the impact you create and the impact leadership recognizes and rewards. Marcylle's five steps close the first gap. The language you use about thirty years of results closes the second.

So here is your move this week. First, take one result from your career, something you built, saved, fixed, or grew. Then write it in one sentence with one number in it. Finally, that sentence goes on the page of notes you carry into the next interview.

About Marcylle Combs

Marcylle Combs is a leadership expert, speaker, author, and podcast host with more than three decades in the healthcare industry. She founded and operated multiple home health and hospice agencies across Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, and today leads a consulting practice serving the home health and hospice field.

Her debut book, Never Hire Your Friends: Leading Your Workplace Through Genuine Connection, turns conventional hiring wisdom upside down. In it she introduces Friendship Management, the approach she used to build her companies on principles of honor, honesty, humility, and integrity, and to lead teams made up of people she truly liked.

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