Job Search AFTER FIFTY, or Hope for the Bushwhacked Generation

I was stuck in an elevator in one of those loft buildings turned into a hipster office building in New York. There were at least 30 of us in the elevator, which was packed wall-to-wall with bodies. The elevator stopped to let one more person on, and my cell phone rang.

I had to take the call: it was the car service guy letting me know he was waiting downstairs.

"Yes, that's right, I'm going to Montclair," I said into the phone. "It's about 12 miles outside the city on Route Three." We hit the ground floor just then and the elevator doors opened.

A young man was waiting for me when I stepped into the lobby. "Did you say Montclair?" asked the kid. "I heard you on your phone but I couldn't see you, so I waited for you."

Yep," I said. "That's where I'm going now. I grew up there."

"Me too!" he said. "Did you go to Montclair High?"

"I did indeed," I said. "What about you?"

"I did too," said the young man. "Class of 2001. What about you?"

"Class of '78," I said, as the young man's face nearly melted.

"Whoa," he said. "That's a long time ago. Well, um, anyway --- you're holding up pretty well!"

The kid cracked me up, but the topic of advancing age is not always humorous to job-seekers of my vintage. I hear stories every day about blatant age discrimination in hiring, including tales of people told by recruiters "This company won't look at you -- you're too old." Yes, of course it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of age, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

"Failure to hire" on the basis of one's age (or any protected status -- I'm talking about US law here, which may be different from the laws in your country) is notoriously hard to prove, and who has time and energy to pursue legal recourse in an age-discrimination situation, anyway?

It is shameful how we treat job-seekers generally, and certain groups of them - older folks, ex-military job-seekers, new grads and returning-to-the-workplace types spring to mind - are treated like dirt in the recruiting process. Either employers are doing a lousy job of educating their hiring managers and recruiting staffers on the basics of employment law, or else people know the laws and just don't care.

I used to be shocked when people would send me articles aimed at fifty-plus job-seekers, sharing tips for how to make themselves look and sound less like themselves and therefore more appealing to employers. Each of these insulting pieces of advice has appeared in print or online in a major publication and offered as a helpful tip for job-seekers of a certain age:

Color your hair (guys and ladies both!) to camouflage your age from screeners.

On a job interview, bring up young-person topics like current pop bands. (My 20-year-old daughter clued me in to Mumford & Sons, featured in the badge atop this column. I'd never heard of them.)

Wear an earbud and let the cord hang from your ear, so you look hip.

(Sorry if that last tip made you throw up in your mouth a little.)

Back in the days when Black people couldn't get hired in white-collar jobs, would we have been comfortable with job-search-advice articles telling Black people how to act more white for a job interview? If not, then why are we comfortable telling fifty-plus job-seekers to pretend to be younger, just to get a job?

That's horrible advice, not only because it justifies and excuses unlawful age discrimination but also because it doesn't work. If a given interviewer is freaked out by people my age, no earbud or gratuitous reference to youth culture is going to win him over. The same way switched-on job seekers ignore Black Hole recruiting systems and make their own contacts, fifty-plus job-seekers can focus on the business pain they solve for their employers, and communicate that value directly to hiring managers.

The good thing about business pain is this: the manager with the pain can't afford to care how old the person bearing painkiller is. They can't afford to care, and they won't care if you show up on a job interview (and even earlier, in your pithy Pain Letter) bringing the business morphine your hiring manager craves.

Baby Boomers come in for a lot of abuse in the media -- we destroyed the environment, ruined the economy and generally hosed up the planet for future generations, so the story goes - but Baby Boomers have also been screwed royally in the shifting of tectonic plates between the old working world and the new. I know, because I helped mix and dole out the Kool-Aid that told corporate workers, "We hope you have a long and happy career here at Acme Explosives!"

Hope is great - I hope you win the lottery tonight and buy an island off the coast of Africa, and invite me over for the weekend without my children. But millions of working people were sold a bill of goods throughout the seventies, eighties and early nineties, and the scam worked like this:

1) Incoming employees were told "Work hard, do your best, put the company's interests ahead of your own, and you'll thrive here."

2) Baby Boomers (and Gen Xers too) followed those instructions to a tee. They worked hard, put the company's interests ahead of their own, gave up all their free time to the job, and waited for the good times to roll.

3) Everything shifted, no one discussed it, no one apologized, and millions of jobs were eliminated or shipped off to God Knows Where. Baby Boomers were left in the lurch.

The corporate ladder is now sawdust under our feet.

I call Baby Boomers the Bushwhacked Generation, where work is concerned. They came into the workforce under one set of expectations, and saw that ecosystem disappear entirely during their working lives. I can't tell you how many people my age write to tell me "I have 27 years of experience with the electric company - surely that should count for something?"

It does count for something -- that electric company job paid your bills for 27 years.

The workplace has changed dramatically since you walked into the electric company in 1986. Employers today value what you can do for them right now. Your 27 years elsewhere doesn't in and of itself make a hiring manager's heart beat faster. The game changed radically, and Baby Boomers among others are paying the price.

So it's 2013, you need a job and you know the second half of this sentence: "Winston tastes good like _________________________." What are your next steps?

1. First thing, lose the "I have 27 years of experience" branding. What you have that employers will value now is knowledge of systems and processes, experience with people, and your ability to solve problems on the ground. These are the things that need to come out in your resume and LinkedIn profile, not your trophies and Employee of the Year awards.
2. Don't list your skills and abilities -- those aren't verifiable, they're generic, and everybody claims the same ones. Tell stories in your resume and your Linkedin profile, instead. Please don't say "stories take too long to tell" because that's false. Check out this sample Human-Voiced Resume and you'll see.
3. Write your resume not to describe every job and task you've ever performed but to convey the relevance of your past work to the assignment you intend to tackle next. That means you need to choose your career direction, rather than letting Craigslist or Monster choose it for you. It also means you need to take the hiring manager's perspective and ask "What parts of my background will be significant to this man or woman? If I were him or her, what would I care about most?"

Here is an E-Book called Twenty Tips for Over-Fifty Job Seekers. It's got a bunch more ideas for surmounting whatever obstacles the 2014 job market throws up for fifty-plus job-hunters.

Whatever your age, it's important to keep in mind that not every job and not every employer deserves you. Age is supposed to bring wisdom, and it will if you stay in your body and remember that your dear parents didn't raise you to grovel and beg. There is a job out there that deserves you and that will grow your flame. There are lots of other jobs that don't deserve you and that can only kill your mojo if you try to force-fit yourself into their little boxes.

Don't listen to people who tell you to deny your age and the wisdom those years have given you. Think about the friends we've lost along the way - they didn't live to see fifty, and we did.

Don't we owe it to them to honor our years on this planet by proclaiming those years proudly, rather than denying them? With luck, our fifty years have given us the ability to say to everyone in our spheres, employers included, "This is who I am, and I rather like me. If I'm not your cup of tea, God bless you all the same!"

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST "LIZ RYAN ANSWERS JOB-SEARCH ADVICE QUESTIONS"

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