A former advertising executive and an entrepreneur in residence at King’s College London have joined forces to start a recruitment agency for older workers.
Adele Aitchison, 33, and David Walsh, 65, started GrandWorks to help over-50s “find fulfilling and flexible work” by matching them with employers struggling to fill job vacancies who value the experience of older staff.
The co-founders met while Aitchison was researching the benefits of later life employment at King’s College. She went on in 2020 to start GrandNanny, which pairs parents with older people, primarily women, who are looking for part-time childcare jobs. “There are so many older women who have raised their own families and fallen out of the workforce. This is a way for them to monetise that skill,” said Aitchison.
Walsh invested in GrandNanny and became executive chairman in November 2020 and the business went on to raise £400,000 in early-stage funding last year. But the pair soon realised that the candidates had skills that would lend themselves to part-time work in other industries too.
“We had people who had held administrative or sales roles. We had somebody who was a coder. They were people with very varied working backgrounds,” said Aitchison. “It felt silly to not respond to that supply side.”
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GrandWorks, which is now the parent company of GrandNanny, launched this month.
Figures recently released from the Office for National Statistics showed that a record 3.6 million over-50s were in part-time employment as of September 2023, an increase of 12 per cent since 2021 and 56 per cent since 2003.
This is driven partly by need – Aitchison points to figures that show that by 2030, 25 per cent of older adults won’t have enough income from their pensions to live on – and partly by a desire to work longer and prevent the decline in mental health that can be associated with “cliff-edge retirements”.
Walsh added that he was a “good case study” for the benefits of working in later life. “I’m 65 years old and I realised that you need a purpose, and need to do something that’s a bit more structured and where I can see the benefits of my involvement and assistance. And so I’m really enjoying committing my time and energies to working with Adele and GrandWorks.”
Walsh is so convinced that the new business has legs he has joined Aitchison as a co-founder. It’s his first operational job since he sold his international IT consultancy Crimsonwing to KPMG in 2015. “It’s quite nice being in an advisory role but it’s a lot more fun when you’re in the battleground of building a business,” he said.
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Walsh is working part-time – about three days a week – on GrandWorks, while Aitchison is committed to the venture full-time.
“Research shows the way you support people to work for longer is by being flexible. So we have to walk that walk in the way we work as well, and set an example,” she said.
“It is quite unusual. You wouldn’t conventionally see a start-up with a co-founder who is working in this way, but we really have to rewrite the old rulebook in how we think about these things. What we say with GrandWorks is it’s not just about the time [older workers are] there, it’s about all of the experience they bring to bear. And that is priceless.”
