Employee recruitment is critical for new ventures, yet the challenges faced by startups complicate their ability to attract top talent. While existing research highlights the importance of entrepreneur traits such as passion, leadership behaviors, and professional affiliations, little attention has been given to the role of surface-level characteristics such as an entrepreneur’s age in shaping recruitment outcomes. This study investigates how perceptions of an entrepreneur’s age influence job seekers’ decisions to apply for positions at new ventures. Blending insights on age salience and stereotypes, social identity, and complementary fit, we explore how age-based perceptions can shape job seeker preferences for working with younger versus older entrepreneurs. Using a controlled experiment with AI-generated entrepreneur profiles, we find that age significantly affects the likelihood of job application, with job seekers being more likely to apply to ventures led by older entrepreneurs. However, this effect is moderated by applicant age, where age similarity with the entrepreneur affects how an entrepreneur’s age is considered when applying to work at a startup. Our findings contribute to entrepreneurship research by highlighting age as a critical factor in human capital acquisition, challenging assumptions about youth dominance in startups, and extending age-related bias discussions to entrepreneurial contexts.
