Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Age proofing resume and signaling towards younger workers in job descriptions/post

In many cases, older workers tend to “age-proof” their resumes to avoid descriptors such as years of experience or year of graduation from school. Some also use languages such as “seasoned” as a pose to stating actual number of years. As I was researching, I Google searched some variations of words “age proofing” and resumes. My single query of “age proofing your resume” resulted in 190,000 hits. The issue of age-proofing and avoiding red flags such as years of experience, old educational information, replacing older versions of job titles with new ones, jargons etc, has been much discussed in popular media. This process must work.
In reserve, the employers might be adding and abetting in the process of age discrimination is a very covert way. We know that we cannot be asked about our nationality, sexual practice etc at a job interview. Similarly the Age Discrimination Act prohibits the employers from making any discrimination in terms of age. This makes any overt indication of preference to age in a job advertisement post highly unlikely. Yet, there are also some covert way to implying such preferences. This can be conscious or subconscious. While briefly scanning through job posting in Career Builder website, most of the postings seem to look for applicant with 2 to 10 years of experience. This basically disqualifies those with less than those two years and most importantly those with more than 10 years.
While analyzing resumes exploring the supply side of this process seemed exciting, doing so will likely prove to be time and resource constraining. Job postings/descriptions look at the demand side of the hiring process, are public and accessible data and also falls within my scope of interest.

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