I saw an open position for a manager role and sent my resume to the company recruiter that had contacted me via a major social site and was contacted the next day by the recruiter letter me know the hiring manager was highly impressed with my resume and could I come in the next day for an on-site interview.
I was unable to due to time constraints but went in for the on-site interview with 3 days of the call from the recruiter, but I was feeling pretty good about the process as they had wanted to get me in for an interview with great enthusiasm.
Upon arriving I was greeted by pleasant HR recruiter who took me to the interview room, and waited for 5-10 minutes as they could not locate the hiring manager.
Upon the hiring manager entering the room and noticing his non-verbal response to seeing I was an older applicant in my 50's (older than him) with his lackluster desire to shake my hand when I offered it and a grunt of a hello, I knew I would not being offered the position.
Next followed a painful 1 hour interview of following a scripted list off question, and me feeling I was pulling teeth trying to get information about the role. I felt I was the one leading the interview process due to the lack of interest I perceived they had for me.
I left feeling I had literally wasted 2 hours of my life, counting the traveling time. The funny thing was after I returned home, I looked through Glassdoors interview reviews and saw someone else had the same experience me.
To quote them "The consideration of me was over less 2 seconds of meeting the interviewers. I made the unforgivable mistake of being older. I could see it in their eyes, body language and tone of the questioning, that they had no interest in talking to me due to my age."
I think they summed up my experience pretty well!
But at the end of the day Aristocrat Technologies were the ones that lost out on loosing my 20 years of Software Development experience. Do I feel I could honestly advise someone in their late 40's to early 50's to apply here, with my hand on my heart no - but if you do I wish you all the best!