Age discrimination in hiring is an illegal yet pervasive practice.
The law protects those above the age of 40 from employment discrimination. However, a 2017 research study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that older adults, especially those aged 65 and up, received significantly lower callbacks after job interviews than their younger counterparts.
While age discrimination is a well-documented phenomenon, in many cases it goes unnoticed and unaddressed. Victims of age discrimination may be unsure of whether or not what they are experiencing classifies as discrimination and hiring officials may be unaware of their implicit biases against older workers. This makes it all the more difficult to address and protect yourself against age discrimination.
Marc Cenedella, a resume expert with 20+ years of experience and founder of Leet Resumes, shared some tips with CNBC Make It on how job applicants can avoid pitfalls that might make you more vulnerable to age discrimination in hiring processes.
Common resume red flags
Choices you make in your resume might inadvertently be working against you. Most Boomers and Gen-X workers often want to include a phone number and a cell phone number on their resume, which Cenedella says tends to be an implicit giveaway of their age.
It is also crucial not to include anything in your resume that is from longer than 15 years ago. "The stuff that you did 20 years ago, as much as you may find it heart-warming and a terrific grounding experience for you, it just simply isn't relevant to why you are going to get a job in 2024," Cenedella says. "What we recommend doing instead is to summarize it in a few words under prior experience."
Cenedella also says to omit putting in your graduation year if you graduated from college before the year 2000, and to stick with Yahoo or Gmail accounts when giving out your email. "AOL.com and Hotmail emails] show that you might not be keeping up with the times."
Same thing goes for when you are in the process of setting up an online interview with someone; it is much better to stick to newer online communication platforms such as Zoom rather than their older counterparts like Skype, Cenedella says.
What to look out for at an interview
"What people fear about hiring somebody with 30-40 years of experience is that they're not going to be coachable," Cenedella says. "So it's helpful if you can use in your examples [at the interview] a time where you learned something from a colleague, especially a younger colleague."
This can help you demonstrate that you work well with people that are younger than you and that you are open to learning things from younger co-workers, says Cenedella. You should also highlight any moments in your career where you educated your co-workers on modern technology.
Overall, it is also much better to highlight your expertise in modern technologies that have been popular in the past 5 years and to avoid talking about your accomplishments in dated tech software and platforms.
"Mentioning a 20-year-old technology that no one uses could be indicating that you are going to be resistant to change," Cenedella says. "It's a classic example of how somebody can shoot themselves in the foot during a job interview."
One way that you can mention old technologies at job interviews, however, is by highlighting what patterns you have noticed in using them that could be applicable to new technologies. For example, if you are expected to learn a new coding language, and you have experience in older languages, highlighting the common patterns you have seen using these languages can indicate that you would be a faster learner than the average hire.
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