Good old chap

Business in France. Jobs for the old.

IN 2007 a French food company wanted to buy a family-owned firm in India. The patriarch was 72, and the French firm wanted to send someone of similar experience to talk to him. But because of its youthful corporate culture—most people are hustled out of the door in their mid-40s—it had no one to send. In the end, through Experconnect, an employment agency in Paris which places retired people, it found a 58-year-old former head of a European consumer-goods firm, and sent him out to...