Age-Proofing Your Resume

0:00College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwicker call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

1:00Nicky Glazer, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day. November 19th, Yamabah Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrative. Tickets on sale now at Yamabah Theater.com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yamabah Theater. Leslie Yazle was a top editor at the Wall Street Journal and real simple. And a resume guru told her to completely scrub her past jobs off her application just a height of age. Yeah, and she actually went through with it. Well, at least at first. She went into her document and just started deleting all those early foundational roles. Imagine sitting at your kitchen table, just looking at the document that proves you spent a quarter of a century climbing to the absolute peak of your industry. Right. You have all the massed heads and the late nights.

2:00All the crises you managed, the institutional knowledge you built up. And you are essentially acting as if a massive portion of your professional life just never happened. She said it made her feel entirely fraudulent, which is completely understandable. A career expert leans over your shoulder and tells you to take the first 10 years of your working life and hit the delete key. Just so an automated system doesn't throw you in the digital trash. Yeah, she was pretending she didn't have her own lived experience. She eventually found the whole cognitive dissonance just too bizarre to maintain and put the jobs back on the page. You are being told to erase the exact foundation that makes you valuable in the first place. We are looking through a stack of sources detailing this really intense debate happening across professional networks right now. People are calling it the ageless resume. And if you are listening to this, sitting at your own computer and trying to compress your entire professional history into a format that won't get you automatically disqualified, you might be facing this exact situation today.

3:00It is this quiet, solitary compromise that thousands of people are making every single week. Companies engineering their own brain drain just to avoid hiring anyone who remembers how things used to be. That is the structural issue underneath all this personal anxiety, I think. You have the individual applicant agonizing over formatting. Adjusting margins, removing dates, just as slip past a gatekeeper. Exactly. But the organizations are making a distinct systemic choice about who they actually allow in the building. They are altering the DNA of their workforce by filtering out historical memory entirely. We can look at the mechanics of this anxiety through the experience of a professional named Diana I. She outlines these completely conflicting rules of the modern job market that applicants are supposed to somehow navigate simultaneously. Which is just a nightmare. It really is. On one hand, you have the standard accepted advice that has been circulating for years, which is to keep your resume to a single page. Right. The classic one page rule. Yeah. And after a decade or so, you're supposed to erase your graduation year.

4:03You are supposed to drop any internships or early career positions to sanitize it and make it look perpetually fresh. But that advice is currently crashing headfirst into the actual mechanical demands of employers. Because when you go into their application portals, those applicant tracking systems, the ATS, they insist on a full chronological work history. Complete with specific months and years. Right. The software algorithms are built to parse continuous date integers. They penalize gaps and calculate your total years of continuous employment to generate a candidate score. So Diana is caught trying to figure out what is actually considered standard because the human advice directly contradicts the software requirements. It creates this impossible catch 22 for any season. College football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition.

5:05Even a marching bandwreck up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. The listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Nicky Glazer This stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day. So... November 19th. Yama Vaugh Theater. No wonder women rush to have kids we're being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it.

6:08I was like, I want out of this narrative. Tickets on sale now at YamaVahTheter.com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yama Vaugh Theater. Professional. Trying to secure a role right now. If you follow the standard advice and hack your career down to fit onto a single page to appease human recruiters, you just end up looking inexperienced. We know recruiters only want to scan a document for about six seconds anyway. By doing that, you strip away the entire context of your career progression. But then if you provide the full chronological history that the application portals demand to satisfy the algorithm, you list everything and immediately get auto-rejected for being too old. The system calculates a number greater than 20 years and just flags you. You are literally penalized for honesty. We are looking at a reality where experience itself is viewed primarily as a liability rather than a strength. The very thing that used to be the ultimate currency in the labor market is now treated as a red flag. A long track record of sustained employment now just indicates you might be too expensive or maybe too inflexible.

7:10You can see how this plays out in a real interview setting with Don Watopka. This grounds all that abstract resume advice in a very physical reality. Right, because she was up for a job recently. She gets into the room and the interviews are going incredibly well. She's having conversations with peers and she hits it off perfectly with a hiring manager. There's rapport, there's a mutual understanding of the industry's complexities. Exactly, and then she gets to the final round. And she is seated across from an interviewer who is very young. And the dynamic shifts completely. The shared vocabulary completely vanishes. Yeah, and following that specific conversation with the junior gatekeeper, she was rapidly rejected. She described the aftermath of that rejection as this quick and painful epiphany. The realization that she is no longer a spring chicken as she put it. And her reaction to that pain was to immediately go back to her resume and start altering reality.

8:12She deleted her college graduation date. She went in and completely removed her first job at the news and observer just to appear younger on paper. You have a highly qualified person attempting to digitally amputate their own history. It speaks to the severe anxiety of being judged by someone sitting across the table who just hasn't lived through the same economic cycles. If you have managed a team through a recession or navigated corporate turbulence, you possess a very specific kind of operational wisdom. But the person evaluating you lacks the necessary context to even understand what you survived. Let alone value it in a hiring decision. Dawn shared a crucial data point in her post that contextualizes this whole sense of desperation. She referenced a recent Gallup poll showing that only 28% of US workers think it is a good time to find a quality job. Which is a staggering metric of low confidence. It is not just a minor dip in sentiment. Nearly three quarters of the workforce looks at the environment and sees it as completely hostile.

9:14That directly connects to the behavioral concept of job hugging. When only a quarter of the workforce believes there is anything decent available out there, people just stop moving entirely. They stay in roles they actively dislike. Yeah, the psychology of risk aversion just takes over the entire labor pool. People tolerate bad management, they accept stagnant wages and they just cling to their current positions. Because when the perceived safety net of a functional job market disappears, nobody takes risks. Everyone just holds on to what they already have. And that freezes up the normal flow of talent and mobility that keeps an economy dynamic. If senior people don't move on to new opportunities, mid-level people can't move up. And then entry-level positions simply vanish. Right. The broader economic sources detail the exact environment driving this fear right now. We have a recent jobs report showing that hiring his eased from his previous surge. The momentum has slowed down significantly across the board. Companies are just not expanding their headcounts with the same urgency they were a year ago.

10:15You layer the cost of living pressures on top of that cooling labor market and you start to really understand why losing a job. Or struggling to find one is so terrifying right now. The economic realities listed in these sources are squeezing everyone from multiple directions simultaneously. You have mortgage rates posting their biggest jump in four years. Which locks people into their current homes and current geographies. You can't just move for a new role easily. Exactly. And you have the price of almost everything climbing due to diesel's record run. That impacts the entire supply chain and bleeds directly into everyday grocery bills. Even consumer behaviors reflecting this strain. New car sales are only being propped up by higher earners right now. The middle of the market is just hollowing out. The economic pressure is relentless. And it fundamentally alters how people approach their careers. Survival basically becomes the primary motivator. Bring all of those massive macroeconomic forces back down to the individual job seeker. But yourself in that position.

11:15Yeah. You are sitting at your computer in your home office or at your kitchen table. You are looking at these terrifying economic indicators. The mortgage rates, the grocery bills, the cooling hiring data. And you look back at your resume. And you have to make a conscious decision to highlight and delete a decade of hard earned professional experience. The late nights that promotions, the acquired knowledge. All just a bypass and algorithm in secure phone screen. You are essentially bartering away your professional identity for the mere chance to pay your bills. If you're not subscribed yet, take a second and hit follow on whatever podcast app you're using. It helps us keep making this. We appreciate you being here. Trisha Nicholas brings a perspective that changes the angle on this entirely. She defines the technical mathematical reality of what mid-career actually means. Which is something a lot of companies seem to get wrong. Right. If you have 20 years of experience, you are technically only halfway through your working life. You probably have another two decades to go.

12:16Yet executive recruiters often look at any jobs held longer than two decades ago and explicitly label them as stale. We have to analyze the filter itself and the people operating that filter on a daily basis. Because the individuals tasked with sorting through these applications and deciding what is or isn't stale are frequently in their early career themselves. They might have less than 15 years of total experience. You have people who are structurally incapable of valuing the same things that someone with deep career stamina understands. When an early career recruiter sees a job from the late 90s, they just see archaic history. But when a seasoned professional sees it, they see the foundation of resilience. They see the ability to adapt to massive technological shifts over time. The trajectory of a career built over decades. But the gatekeepers simply do not possess the vocabulary to read the map they are being handed. Scott Lewis brings a validation to this from the inside. Yeah, his wife is a senior HR executive and he confirms that chopping off work experience older than 20 years is no longer just a fringe trick or some desperate measure.

13:23It is now the accepted industry standard. It is literally baked into the standard operating procedure of modern human resources. Scott zeroes in on the reasoning behind this standard and he identifies a severe lack of mentorship. The young hiring managers sitting in these positions of authority were just never taught how to identify a candidate's potential. They were never mentored on how to conduct an interview that accurately judges wisdom, depth and judgment. Interviewing is a really complex skill. Evaluating a human being's capacity to solve complex problems requires training and insight. If a company strips away its senior leadership and leaves development entirely to chance, the incoming managers default to rigid superficial metrics. They look for exact keyword matches. They look for familiar recent brands on the resume. They have no framework for assessing the quiet competence that comes from 20 years in the trenches. Scott expands on this with the idea of narrow casting. Companies are actively creating a self-propeptuating echo chamber.

14:26College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oho, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwick up call it 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

15:26Nicky Glazer, this stunning tour. The thoughts of death I don't like to dwell on them for longer than like 10 or 15 hours a day, so... November 19th, Yamabah Theater. No wonder women rushed to have kids were being trained for it since we were kids. They're like, here's a baby doll. Here's an easy-bake oven. I got one of those. I stuck my head in it. I was like, I want out of this narrative. Tickets on sale now at Yamabah Theater.com. Don't miss Nicky Glazer. Yamabah Theater. By relying on these flawed superficial filters, they are severely limiting their talent pool. They are only hiring people who fit a very specific, inexperienced profile and they are ignoring a massive reservoir of capable talent. Hold on though, is it just lack of mentorship? Are we certain this is just accidental ignorance on the part of the recruiters? Well, Chad Corley brings up a much more cynical and honestly likely accurate point. He argues companies are actively choosing to invest less in senior roles.

16:27So this is deliberate economics? Exactly. They simply want the cheaper option. It is not that they don't realize older workers have valuable experience. It is that they don't want to pay the premium that experienced commands in the market. They would rather hire a cheaper, less experienced candidate to keep payroll costs down for the current quarter. The commoditization of labor basically treats all experience as an unnecessary luxury if a junior person can just do the baseline tasks for half the price. Chad follows that logic to its natural consequence though. They hired the less experienced person to save money on the salary. And then the new hire gets overwhelmed because they lack the trajectory and the historical knowledge to handle really complex problems. Things start breaking. The projects stall out. The baseline tasks just aren't enough when an actual crisis hits. And maybe a year later the company ends up needing to hire a seasoned professional anyway to come in and fix the mess. Completely negating whatever salary savings they thought they achieved in the first place. Janet M. Stolval points out another bizarre corporate assumption that feeds right into the cycle.

17:31She notes that if you are over a certain age, companies just assume you want to be an independent consultant. They write you off for full-time internal roles entirely. They look at a resume with 30 years of progression and assume you only want to parachute in for fractional work or high level advising. They project an entire career motivation onto you based strictly on the length of your work history. Deciding on your behalf what kind of employment you prefer rather than, you know, just asking you. So people are pushing back against the trend though. Michael Shane Blatt refuses to participate in the Erasure Edel. He flat out refuses to act his newspaper experience from his resume. He offers a very casual reality check about the Horserade pointing out that his gray hair is going to be a dead giveaway anyway. He recognizes the futility of pretending to be 28 on paper when you are going to show up to the interview looking exactly like the seasoned professional you actually are. There is a certain dignity in just owning your tenure and letting the chips fall where they may. If we look sideways at the news headlines surrounding this labor market, the contrast is just absurd.

18:34How so look at the rigid perfectly linear expectations placed on job applicants versus the wild unpredictable behavior of the corporations demanding those resumes. Oh right. It is like a company wants to be a Swiss Army knife pivoting to whatever the market needs, but they demand their employees be perfectly forged scalples designed to do exactly one thing for 30 years. Exactly. You have grinder getting into health care with a quarter billion dollar acquisition. Authentic brands is eyeing a takeover of Mattel. Corporations are allowed to pivot wildly whenever they want. They can buy unrelated businesses completely changed their industry footprint and rebrand overnight. But they expect your individual resume to be a perfectly straight unbroken line that makes immediate sense to a 24 year old scanning it for six seconds. The hypocrisy is that the Swiss Army knife is demanding a drawer full of scalples. Look at one last bizarre career path from the sources. We have a former NFL coach who spent 12 years building a massive Minecraft city.

19:35You have to wonder how you would even attempt to explain a 12 year Minecraft gap to a young recruiter using an early career filter. The algorithms would just short circuit trying to process a human life that actually took an interesting nonlinear path. The systems we have built are entirely hostile to human weirdness or unconventional growth. Experience is a track record of solving complex problems and hiding it just harms the organizations that desperately need that exact wisdom. If every seasoned professional successfully scrubs their resume to look like a junior employee, who is actually running the ship when things inevitably go wrong? If you're not subscribed yet, take a second and hit follow on whatever app you're using. It helps us keep baking this. We appreciate you being here. Also check out our YouTube channel for more business and tech updates. There's a link in the description.