Greenfield recruitment and selection: Implications for the older worker

The recruitment of young, “green” workers has long been recognised as a defining characteristic of the greenfield site. Extends understanding of how person‐centred recruitment, with its emphasis on employee acceptability, disadvantages the older greenfield applicant. Whether it be a new high commitment or customer service site, worker age is shown to combine with the conventional recruitment criteria of skill, class and gender to constitute an excluded labour segment. In its superior capacity to shape workforce composition, greenfield person‐centred recruitment is shown to be important to understanding the ways in which managerial control is pursued and exercised more widely than within the labour process. Leopold and Hallier’s framework of greenfield types is also modified to encompass new customer service sites where acceptability recruitment is critical to greenfield employers’ labour relations strategies. Concludes that person‐centred recruitment should be studied as a critical feature of greenfield workplace politics and practices.