The U.S. job market is on the mend but boomer workers are probably being left behind.

Workers aged 45 to 70 who lose a job face steep challenges in finding new work — and even when they do find a job, it’s often at lower pay and with fewer benefits than they enjoyed before, according to a new survey by AARP, published Monday.

Fully 50% of the people surveyed — respondents were 45- to 70-years old and had been unemployed at some point in the past five years — were still unemployed or had dropped out of the workforce, according to the survey of 2,492 people.

Twenty percent of those surveyed had two spells of unemployment in the previous five years and 23% had three or more bouts of unemployment in that time. (AARP didn’t release data on income and occupation.)

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“Long after the Great Recession, too many 50-plus workers who want to work are still unemployed, and once unemployed it takes them longer on average to find jobs than younger job seekers,” said Jo Ann Jenkins, president of AARP, in a news conference in Washington.

That’s despite a relatively strong labor market. In 2014, job growth hit its fastest pace since the late 1990s, with the U.S. economy adding an average of about 250,000 jobs each month, according to data cited by Heidi Shierholz, chief economist with the U.S. Labor Department, in a presentation at the AARP conference.

Older workers do enjoy a lower unemployment rate: 4.4% for workers age 65 and over, compared with 5.5% for the U.S. market overall, according to February data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The problems start if and when they lose their jobs.

“Older workers are less likely to become unemployed, but if they are unemployed they are more likely to get stuck in unemployment for long periods,” Shierholz said. “We are potentially seeing the fingerprints of age discrimination here.”

When asked about barriers to finding work, 57% of the job seekers surveyed by AARP said “employers think I am too old.” But 71% pointed to a lack of available jobs and 60% said that being tied to a specific geographic area hampered their job search.

Other factors also are in play, Shierholz said. “Older workers spend a long time developing specific skills and experience” — that means it can take them longer to find a match.

A lower rung on the career ladder

Even if they find work, often it’s not as good a job as they left behind, according to the AARP survey. Fully 48% of the job seekers who had found work said they were earning less money than before.

And older job seekers who found work were twice as likely to be working part time than older workers who had not been hit by recent unemployment. Among the re-employed older workers, 34% were working part time, compared with 16% among all workers age 45 to 70.

“A lot of these folks, although they are working which is certainly better than not working, they are doing so at jobs that are not as good as the jobs they had before they became unemployed,” said Gary Koenig, a co-author of the report and vice president of the AARP Public Policy Institute.

“The national statistics on unemployment are masking some serious challenges that older workers face,” Koenig said.

It’s likely that some older workers who move to part-time jobs are choosing to scale back and work less hard (the survey didn’t ask this). But some are not: 47% of the part-time workers surveyed said they would prefer a full-time job.

The survey also found that 53% of the re-employed workers had switched occupations. Some of that might have been a job seeker’s decision to find more rewarding work, but, the report said, “In most cases, the change was probably necessary to find a job.” Read the full report.

There is some good news: 29% of the re-employed workers said they were earning more than they had before, and about 20% said their new job had better retirement and health benefits than their old job.

Among older workers who had found a new job, the worst prospects were faced by those who were unemployed for six months or longer. The long-term unemployed were likelier to be working part time, to be earning less than their previous job, and to say that their new job had fewer retirement and health-care benefits than the job they’d held before.

Forty-one percent of those who had been long-term unemployed said they were now working part time, compared with 29% of those who had faced short-term unemployed.

And 59% of those who had a long bout of unemployment were earning less in their new jobs, compared with 41% of the short-term unemployed.

Job strategies that don’t work

If you’re trying to find a job, it makes sense to study people who did just that, and to take a pass on the strategies used by people who are still pounding the pavement.

Here’s what you should avoid: Waiting too long before starting your search.

“The unemployed were much more likely than the re-employed to have waited longer — three months or more — before beginning their job search,” the AARP report said. Specifically, 24% of the unemployed waited three months or more before looking for work, compared with 14% of the re-employed.

Still, sometimes practical or psychological reasons force a delay. Sixty-six percent of respondents who waited before starting their job search said they needed a break, 57% took time to think about what they wanted to do next, 56% had savings or other income and 42% said they found it hard to get motivated.

Twenty-five percent said caregiving responsibilities prevented them from immediately looking for work, and 25% said they waited because they didn’t know how to get started.

“We forget the emotional toll that unemployment takes on people. For many people a job loss is a shock and they’re unable to start looking for work immediately,” said Lori Trawinski, a co-author of the report and a director of AARP’s Public Policy Institute.

“This is a time in their life when they should be at maximum earning levels and preparing and saving for retirement,” she added. “For unemployment experience to hit them at this moment is devastating.”

Another effective job-search strategy: reaching out directly to employers. Forty-eight percent of re-employed workers took this step (and 59% of them said it was “very or somewhat effective”), versus just 37% of the unemployed.

The most-effective tactic cited by job seekers who found work? Reaching out to their network. Sixty-eight percent of the re-employed who had taken that step said it was a “very or somewhat effective” job-hunting strategy.

Also, 58% of the re-employed who asked relatives and friends about jobs said it was a very or somewhat effective step. And 55% of the re-employed who checked online job boards said it was a very or somewhat effective step.

As noted above, the AARP survey asked workers what job-hunt strategies they rated most effective. But here are the percentages of re-employed versus unemployed who used a particular strategy: