Best And Worst Ways To Beat Job Search Ageism With Your Resume

One of the bigger challenges that age 40+ candidates face today is poor advice.

Most career coaches/authors and outplacement firms give terrible advice to age 40+ job seekers, instead suggesting to use the worst ways to beat job search ageism.

To make matters worse, these resources also fail to teach the best way to beat ageism.

So it's a good thing you've got me ... to show you a better way.

The Worst Way To Beat Job Search Ageism: Trying to hide your age through specific exclusion - Excluding graduation dates, early jobs, and/or dates of early jobs. This is the most common strategy for age 40+ job seekers, taught by nearly all career coaches, outplacement advisors, and used by professional resume writers, as a way to hack ATS screening for dates before a target date, to estimate age. But these career resources don't tell you the reasons why this trick fails:

• Employers screening based on dates leave an audit trail of illegal age discrimination: It's rare screening by dates actually happens, because HR leaders don't allow recruiters to screen by dates, to protect the employer from losing HR lawsuits or government actions (this also protects HR leaders' jobs).
• ATSs can also screen for the lack of dates: To screen out applicants who are trying to hide something.
• Excluding dates/early career sticks out like a red flag to human screeners: It causes human screeners to wonder "What are you hiding? Age, or something worse?". Hiding dates and early career is exactly how candidates trying to hide jail time, theft, or fraud write resumes.
• You set a first impression of being much younger than you really are: If you actually get an interview, your resume gave an employer a perception of age that you can't live up to in person. You risk that you'll instead create a first impression that you deceived the employer and aren't trustworthy (Come on, let's be honest ... you did try to deceive them about your age, by leaving out early career, early career dates and/or graduation dates).

The Best Way To Beat Ageism With Your Resume: Demonstrate overwhelming Impact. Take a look at your resume - If it's like almost all resumes today, it focuses your reader on job descriptions/responsibilities/qualifications/skills.

These don't clearly show employers if you were a success or failure, but forces them to guess. Lack of impact undersells you as a candidate, as you fail to show employers you're worth a higher salary (failing to overcome employer perception that you're more expensive, but instead appearing that you're not worth a higher perceived expense).

If you're losing opportunities to younger, less expensive candidates, you aren't proving to employers that you're worth their perception of your compensation. Employers respond by taking a risk on a less expensive choice. This is just one example of far more effective ways to get interviews, beat ageism, and land a great job fast when you're age 40+.

I help people solve the most difficult job search problems, including job search acceleration, getting past ATSs, ageism, remote positions, product/job function/career/industry/ geographic change, unemployment, "bouncy" recent career path, job search turnaround, seeking raise/promotion, industry in decline/consolidation, long term gaps, family leave, or other of the most challenging job search issues.

Join me for my next free Resume Webinar (enroll at https://x.resumewebinar.com/Registration for no charge) and learn how to accelerate your job search, so you can find your next job faster in 2024.

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