Making Your Job Search Differentiation Pay Off When You're 40+

It's important for job seekers to differentiate themselves in their resumes and interviews ... It's critical when you're in your 40's. 50's or 60's.

But few candidates over 40 differentiate themselves effectively, leading to missing out on opportunities when you're qualified, failing to advance in the hiring process, and losing job offers as a finalist.

These situations often lead to feedback of the "O" word for age 40+ candidates - Overqualified.

Here are a few ways to make your job search differentiation more effective when you're over 40:

1. Better Personal Branding:?Your personal brand is the first impression you give employers in your resumes and interviews, but the personal brand most job seekers give is confusing, branding you as average. Instead, create a personal brand that clearly tells employers "I have what you need".
2. Heavy Customization:?Invest more time customizing your resume and interviews to fit the hiring manager's current key/priority problems. Most job seekers spend an average 15 minutes customizing your resume and less customizing your interviews, causing you to get screened out for opportunities and to fail to advance for jobs when you're qualified, as the lack of customization makes you appear average to employers.
3. Improved Information Sources:?Finding better employer information can help you effectively differentiate yourself in ways that employers notice. Publicly available information gives you zero advantage over your competition, and almost never reflects hiring manager current needs. The worst publicly available information is the job description, which is usually either generic or recycled from the departing employee. So how could the job description help you look like a fit when it doesn't reflect hiring manager needs? Same things go for company websites/LinkedIn Pages, financial statements, and Google searches.

These are only a few examples of the many ways you can improve how you differentiate yourself to employers. They're even more effective as few of your competitors will use them, instead opting for high volume job search strategies with little differentiation and making the same mistakes over and over, while hoping for different results.

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/register for no charge) and learn how to accelerate your job search, so you can find your next job faster in 2023.

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