If you are on the hunt for a new job and you are over the age of 50, things can seem daunting. Will your age alone get your resume kicked out of the potential candidate pile?
Love keeping up with business news? Download the Audacy app and follow WBBM Newsradio to get WBBM’s Weekend Wallet newsletter!
WBBM Newsradio’s Rob Hart got the inside scoop on how to age-proof resumes and navigate job search challenges that may pop up for more seasoned candidates this week on the Noon Business Hour. Rick Cobb, founder of the Chicago-based workplace consulting firm 2-Discern, joined the program.
“You see this on social media where people who are over 50 talk about how they can still be a positive contributor to an organization,” said Hart. “They’re concerned that even if they’re 51, 52, or 55, that they could be screened out by a much younger person in the recruiting department.”
According to 2024 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are a considerable amount of people in that age range in the labor force. Still, Cobb said this is a valid concern.
“We all have biases, whether they’re somewhat benign or more severe. And those biases can be overcome by only one thing, and that's personal experience. So, you can say that you do or don’t like a particular type of person or where they went to school or people of a certain age, but you’ll have exceptions in your own life,” he explained.
While older candidates can bring a wealth of experience to their roles, Hart noted that recruiters might be worried that they might be too expensive to hire or that they might have a hard time adjusting to a changing workplace environment. Cobb said it is especially important for older job seekers to address that second concern.
“Saying ‘income is not the issue for me,’ at least in the early process, the early filtering process, isn’t going to be believed, because it just doesn’t seem to make any sense,” he said.
To get around these assumptions, he said applicants “have to try to find a way to avoid the filtering mechanisms as much as possible,” and try to get face-to-face meetings.
“The goal is to understand the person that you’re talking to’s wants and needs, and then try to align any of your experiences with what they seem to want or need, and if you can tell a story about it, that’s great,” Cobb recommended.
Of course, there’s also an elephant in the resume room for some of these applicants: jobs and education that come with dates from the 1990s. It’s easy to spot the difference between dates that start with “19” rather than “20” when quickly skimming through a resume.
“You don’t put your date of your graduation… if you’ve got a good school background, you put that on… your academic experience is important, but anything that’s happened in past the last 15 years – unless it’s just absolutely monumental and unprecedented you just leave [it] out of your resume – no one’s going to care,” said Cobb.