You've put in decades earning career experience. That's a good thing, right?
Boly:Welch
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?? Welcome back to Never Job Search Alone! This week, we look at how being overqualified may harm your chances in the job search process -- and a few easy tweaks you can make to better position yourself for the roles you want. ?
Q: For the past four months I’ve been applying for jobs. I can see that hiring managers are looking at my LinkedIn, but I haven’t been getting many interviews. I have 25 years of experience, so I think I’m a competitive candidate. My friend told me I might be overqualified for the jobs I’m applying for. Why isn’t this a good thing? ?
A: You’ve probably seen the 5-7 years or 10+ years of experience many job postings include in their qualifications section. Hiring managers are rarely looking for exact matches here, but it can give you a sense of the level of responsibility and experience a company is seeking in a role.??
While your 25+ years have certainly strengthened your skills, there’s often a bias in many industries against experience beyond a certain point. The thinking is that older experience may no longer be as relevant to the current needs of the role, even if you’ve been working in the field consistently. There is also an assumption that candidates with more experience will have outsized salary expectations for the role they are applying for or will not be as coachable.??
We usually tell candidates to focus on the last 10-15 years of their experience because things change so much. For example, in recruiting, 15 years ago we advertised for roles in the local paper, collected paper resumes, and had a functioning fax machine. Now, we’ve shifted to digital platforms like LinkedIn, added virtual interviews to the process, and rarely use our printer. Roles that may seem similar on the surface now require very different tools and approaches.??
One way to navigate this bias would be to trim down or reframe the older parts of your work history to make your experience feel more current and aligned with today’s job market. Like you said, you have the experience — don’t feel like you must include all of it if it’s not getting you any additional opportunities.
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Diligent with Details
2 个月Career length is an interesting thing to finesse!?I followed the standard advice to list only the last 15 years of my work history here on LinkedIn and also on my résumé.?Then, with no transparency, a former employer used the career dates listed on LI or an employee’s résumé to determine their number of work experience years.?This number was incorporated into a formula used to determine “equitable” pay increases.? ? After discovering they had omitted my lengthier work history, I challenged the formula.?Surprisingly, they pushed back with the explanation that the 15 years was a matter of public record and declined to adjust my formula.? ? It wasn’t until I reminded them that age is a protected class and their position wasn’t defensible that they made the change.?And I wasn’t the oldest employee by several decades!?It was disappointing, but alas not surprising, that their efforts to course correct for other inequities (gender + race) overlooked age entirely.