Tips help baby boomers prevent ‘aging’ candidacy
Dear Sam: I just turned 55 and am concerned that my age is going to impact the success of my job search. I hear horror stories of more-mature candidates being screened out based on age. I don’t know at what point to start being concerned that my résumé won’t get my foot in the door regardless of whether I am the most qualified candidate. How do I make sure my experience sells me before my age disqualifies me? — Mark
Dear Mark: I understand your concern, and I hear the same worry on a daily basis from my clients. There is a way to ensure that you maximize your candidacy while minimizing the potential age disqualifier.
I believe the potential of being disqualified in a screening process may be based less on your age; a more-experienced candidate may be, well, just too experienced. Being overqualified, too expensive or less flexible than a junior counterpart are all factors a hiring manager may consider. While I understand age can play a role, we should think past the knee-jerk reaction of blaming age and instead figure out how to create a more compelling and qualified presentation of your candidacy.
The best way to illustrate how you can serve your candidacy well is to tell you about a baby boomer I had the privilege of working with and the challenges we were able to overcome.
Rebecca came to me seeking help in positioning her for what she hoped would be her last career move. With 33 years of experience in the field of human resources, she wanted to show potential employers that she was an expert in her craft while not aging her candidacy. Rebecca had a jam-packed two-page résumé that was not aesthetically pleasing, was difficult to read, was missing a balanced presentation of duties and accomplishments, and was aging her candidacy because the résumé explored roles back to 1978.
The challenge faced by a lot of baby boomers is the need to present the “right” amount of experience on paper. While one would assume you should present all of your experience to differentiate yourself from less-experienced competition, in doing so you highlight your age — and hiring managers may assume you have higher-than-average salary expectations. This presents quite a conundrum for candidates who want to showcase how experienced they are but, in doing so, over-qualify themselves for the job.
In Rebecca’s case, because she was seeking more seniorlevel roles, it would have been acceptable to explore 20 or so years of experience. However, her first employer was one she stayed with for 18 years, so including it in a traditional manner would have immediately aged her candidacy. To ensure that we didn’t do that, I explored her positions back through 1996, which provided hiring managers with a solid 15-year career track record, while “bylining” her early experience.
Bylining early experience is a key way for more-seasoned candidates to present their experience while avoiding the potential of unnecessarily aging their candidacy. To do this, add a subheading (Foundational Experience or a similarly named subheading) at the end of your Professional Experience section. In this section, you remove all notes of dates, allowing the inclusion of early experience without the context of how long you were employed.
In Rebecca’s case, this was key in presenting her depth of knowledge and experience in the field while not presenting experience back into the 1970s and 1980s.
In following this strategy, delivering compelling content that would speak to her target market’s needs, adding a third page to her résumé to provide critical white space (three-page résumés are common, and often necessary in presenting a more senior-level candidate’s career) and creating a compelling visual aesthetic, Rebecca’s new résumé was far more effective and attractive.
Read of Rebecca’s success, and view her before and after résumés, at ladybug-design.com/blog.