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I've notice this several times. Recent example. 2 women went for a job in a different dept. One who has never missed a day (besides vacation of course) in 3 years, never late, and has great time management also helping the supervisor with work. (She is 45) The other one is late almost everyday and constantly falls behind. (She is 30) The 30 year old got the job. Everything was surprised. The older one was much more qualified. Could it be an age thing?
I've notice this several times. Recent example. 2 women went for a job in a different dept. One who has never missed a day (besides vacation of course) in 3 years, never late, and has great time management also helping the supervisor with work. (She is 45) The other one is late almost everyday and constantly falls behind. (She is 30) The 30 year old got the job. Everything was surprised. The older one was much more qualified. Could it be an age thing?
There could be a million things yourself or anyone in the department isn't aware of.
Maybe the one you "decided" is more qualified causes problems you're not aware of, maybe the younger one is related to someone in management, maybe maybe maybe...
I learned long ago not to try to figure/judge things that I wasn't directly involved in.
It's just gossip.
Somet People also pick a younger employee because they want someone's moldable and they are too insecure to hire someone who is more of a peer or set in their ways.
Somet People also pick a younger employee because they want someone's moldable and they are too insecure to hire someone who is more of a peer or set in their ways.
On the flip side - I worked for a company that would only hire "older" people (like myself) because they had horrific experiences with the work ethic or lack of...of younger people - their words... not mine.
Hey OP, being on time, late, or early sometimes have nothing to do with how well people perform.
Here is an example. A couple years ago, my team was working in the same office as another engineering team. There was one guy in that team that consistently came in late and leaving early. People started talking about him behind his back. He didn't care though and kept on doing his thing.
Well, there were major flaws coming from that team and problems that cost the company a lot of money. They also ended up with several noncompliance reports. Very bad.
When it came to blame, everyone in that team pointed their finger at that guy. People from other teams were brought in to do a thorough audit. I was one of the auditors. Turned out everything that guy did was perfectomundo. More than perfect. He went above and beyond his call of duty and made sure other peoples work were good. Most of the good corrections had his name next to them.
That team eventually got liquidated. Some were absorbed into other teams while some got fired. But when it came to that guy, managers were fighting each other to get him. He eventually came to my team. Very sharp guy.
The moral of the story is being on time or not says nothing about the skill level or competence of a person. I'm a manager and I don't really care if people show up on time or not. Just get the job done with a certain level of quality.
I have found that incompetent people can't tell the difference between good work and bad work, so they fall back to unimportant things like being early to work. Some of the most competent people I've worked with are flexible with the time while some of the most incompetent people I have seen we're always super early in the morning.
I'm not saying being late is good. Don't get me wrong. I expect people to be on time for meetings and whatnot. But on a regular day, just get the job done with quality.
It's probably not an age thing, and it probably is a salary thing.
Why would an employer choose a less qualified person at the same salary?
The #1 reason older people lose out on jobs is because they expect more money than the employer is willing to pay. Employers also know that taking a pay cut demoralizes people, whereas a younger person will be grateful. So it's a mismatch of expectations.
There could be other reasons too, like the older person being less willing to drink management Kool-Aid, or work odd hours, or have higher medical benefit costs.
All this said, the most likely explanation is that the older employee would expect more pay for the position than the younger employee.
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It's common for one's perception/observations of coworker performance to be mistaken. The supervisor doing the performance reviews is the only one that really knows each employee's value to the organization. In the case of a promotion to another department, part of the decision will be based on the immediate supervisor's recommendations to the hiring manager. The rest is based on the resume and interviews. Without seeing the resume and being at the interviews it's impossible to determine why that person was selected for the promotion.
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