Over 50 and marketing it

Gene Burnard, 64, of Marlborough, helps connect employers with the over-50 population. His latest thrill hobby is his Harley-Davidson. (Joanne Rathe/Globe Staff)

Gene Burnard has designed flight simulators for NASA, processed scientific data for the oil exploration industry, and worked with companies developing radar systems. He's gone from flying airplanes to jumping out of them.

Now the 64-year-old Marlborough resident feeds his need for speed with a Harley-Davidson, and is kept grounded by helping his peers find jobs through his company, Workforce50.com, which specializes in connecting employers to the over-50 population.

"I have heard so many stories about the over-50, -60, and -70 crowd not being able to find work," said Burnard. "There's not just active age discrimination, but passive, as we're indoctrinated all the time that young is good."

One of Burnard's theories on why people in their 50s and older have trouble getting their foot in the door is that many recruiters are in their 20s and 30s.

"The idea for them to invite someone in who could be their parent, or in some cases grandparent, creates an apprehension," Burnard said.

There are a number of other websites that cater to older job hunters, such as Retired Brains (retiredbrains.com), Seniors for Hire (seniorsforhire.com), and Retirement Jobs (retirementjobs.com).

Many, warns Burnard, are aggregate listings, filled with items from other boards that are presented as jobs for the over-50 crowd. Some sites will have up to 23,000 postings.

"A lot of job seekers are vulnerable - not simply because of their age, but the socioeconomic situation that they find themselves in," said Burnard. "We're not going to have an ad from the US Army for an infantryman, which I found on another seniors site."

Burnard said that his site has received offers from employment sites like Indeed.com, but he's refused them "because they might be for someone who needs to lift a 120-pound bale of hay, and that's not what we want."

Workforce50.com averages about 250 job openings at any given time, he said. To weed out the general postings that are found on many sites, Burnard charges $109 for each one, which runs for 60 days.

By nature, he said, companies paying to post are the ones who are truly interested in hiring older workers. Burnard adds about 150 jobs each month, but feels that there should be over 2,000, considering the number of companies nationwide.

"With more than 10,000 small businesses that have under 500 employees, each could hire someone who is over 50," said Burnard.

Job seekers can submit resumes and fill out profiles at the site, and are then notified by e-mail of likely matches. Their personal information is not shared with employers, Burnard said.

Dawn Whalen of New Hartford, Conn., has used Workforce50 when hiring for her business, Computer Explorers, a technology education company for children and adults.

"At one point I had a retired science teacher, an engineer, and a CEO working for me," said Whalen. "Workforce50 is a very easy site to use."

But Burnard also receives about four calls each week from discouraged job hunters.

The most common, he said, are from people who tell him, " 'I need a job now - my husband is out of work, and we have medical bills.' And for every call that comes in, there are thousands of other people in the same situation."

One call was from a woman who said she had $97 in the bank and her house was going to be taken away the next week; another was from a West Coast resident with two master's degrees and a doctorate in a technology field; he'd been looking for a job for a year.

"There are only so many times you can be told how to write a resume, how to conduct an interview or network and do a job search," said Burnard. "I try to instill the importance of carrying a positive attitude, as so many people get beaten down that it's hard to be positive."

Burnard got into the business in 2005 when he acquired SeniorJobBank, a company that was founded in 1975 by someone whose mother was having a hard time finding work, and he then retooled it into Workforce50.com.

Burnard and Nancy Peterson, his business and life partner, run Workforce50.com out of their Marlborough office; Peterson has master's degrees in both finance and accounting. They also own and run JobMark.com, which manages and builds corporate career portals in a range of fields, from biotech to water utilities and library associations.

Burnard has a penchant for excitement both in business and his personal life. He grew up in central Ohio, joined the Air Force out of high school, then attended a year of technical school in Biloxi, Miss. For three years he worked in Iowa as a radar engineer, then attended the Florida Institute of Technology, where he earned a degree in engineering. He landed a job working on the space program with Link Aviation, inventor of the flight simulator.

"It was quite a life experience working with the astronauts," said Burnard, who spent six years at Cape Canaveral, Fla., watching moon launches. One of his favorite astronauts, he said, was Pete Conrad.

"He was kind of a wild person," said Burnard. "One of the foulest mouths but one of the best astronauts out there." The two would race their cars across the causeway between Titusville and the Kennedy Space Center's launch area. "He had a Corvette and I had a Mustang," he said, "so it was never much of a race."

During that time Burnard got his pilot's license and also began skydiving.

When the space program began to slow down, Burnard moved his career from high in the atmosphere to underground, in data processing for the oil business so geologists and geophysicists knew where to drill. He moved to Massachusetts in 1976 when one of his employer's vendors recruited him to sell scientific software.

After 20 years in sales, Burnard decided to set up his own consulting business in sales and marketing, and started the NHC Group Inc. and JobMark.com.

Doug Smith, a software developer from Waltham, has worked with Burnard on various projects for WorkForce50.com and JobMark. He said he is constantly amazed by the number of people who seek Burnard out at conventions and trade shows. Some are from Burnard's days at NASA.

"On several occasions Gene has said he wants to work and play until he dies," said Smith. "Many of the retirees we talked to at a recent AARP national convention in Boston feel the same way, and that fuels Gene's desire to make WorkForce50 a success."

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