A South Korean firm has defied convention by hiring only candidates aged above 55 years old.

Content monitoring startup EverYoung, has hired over 420 seniors since 2013, Channel NewsAsia reported.

Despite their age, employees are involved in the company’s digital business, monitoring blog content on the Naver platform (the country’s version of Google), as well as running coding classes for students.

The company has a rule that all employees, who rotate on four-hour shifts, take a 10-minute break for every 50 minutes of work.

Founder Chung Eunsung established this recruitment policy because he wanted to dispel age discrimination, a rampant problem in corporate South Korea.

“Korea is ageing and the phenomenon is accelerating, so we believe that their participation in our economy would in fact, revitalise it, as well as breathe some life into the aging society,” he told Channel NewsAsia.  

EverYoung’s manager Kim Seong-Kyu said older workers, unlike youths, display higher levels of attention to detail. That’s because they keep their phones away in lockers during work, and are less easily distracted.

“They are full of passion. The time that they have, and their interest in this work, are primarily why they come to work,” said Kim.