You're Not Fooling Anyone By Hiding Age On Your Resume When You're Over 40 (and why would you want to?)

When you try to hide your age on your resume, you're not fooling anyone.

So why would you want to exclude your early career or graduation dates?

Hiding this information has a very low chance of giving you any benefit, but a high chance that it will get you screened out, fail to advance and fail to get offers.

Here are a few reasons why you don't want to even try to fool employers about your age:

1. Your Age Can't Be Your Superpower, When You Try To Hide It: You know you can run circles around younger, less experienced, less expensive competitors. Don't you want to make your age the reason an employer wants to hire you?
2. Makes You A Riskier Candidate: Employers can tell you're hiding something when you exclude dates and early career. Is it your age or something worse? Why take the risk?
3. You Can't Support The Impression Your Resume Makes When You're Face To Face: Do you really think, to a skeptical audience, looking for candidate inconsistencies, in a stressful situation that you'll look 5, 10, 20 years younger than you really are? In reality, hiding your age sets you up for failure to advance, or land offers.
4. You're Depending On False Information When Trying To Hide Age: Heads of HR don't allow their recruiters to screen resumes by dates. Think of all the digital evidence of age discrimination just waiting for lawyers, if the executive leading HR allowed screening by dates.

I know you've been advised to hide your age by excluding early career and graduation dates by outplacement advisors, career coaches, and professional resume writers. It's the most common advice given to age 40+ job seekers - It's also the worst advice given to senior candidates, because you can't establish trust through deception.

Wouldn't you sleep better at night by making your age an asset, rather than deceiving hiring managers about your age and hoping they don't notice ... but knowing they usually will notice?

There are far more effective strategies you can use to beat job search ageism ...

During my next free Resume Webinar, Beating Job Search Ageism, I'll show you different resume/interview/job search strategies that will help you sell yourself more effectively. I'll teach you how to make age your superpower and employers will clearly see that you're worth higher compensation than younger candidates. No matter what your compensation requirements, I'll show you how to prove to employers that you're a steal, compared to the impact you can deliver.

When we're done with that, I'll teach you other ways to overcome age bias, so you can accelerate your job search so much, you can find your next job faster, easier and more successfully in 2025 when you're 40/50/60+.

Join me Thursday morning 2/27/25 at 11:00am ET/8:00am PT or Friday morning 2/28/25 at 11:00am ET/8:00am PT for my free Resume Webinar - Beating Job Search Ageism (enroll at https://x.resumewebinar.com/Registration at no charge) to learn how to overcome job search ageism and find your next job faster in 2025.

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