According to a resume “expert” at a career website: “your degree is over 10 years old; time to take out the dates. Junior reviewers will toss your resume and make you a victim of age discrimination.”
Intentionally omitting dates is a colossal mistake, for two reasons: when you withhold information, you invite others to infer your reason for doing so; and, obscuring your years of experience will only cause you to be passed over for the most desirable positions.
In the case of this resume expert, the reason for omitting dates is: “junior reviewers will toss your resume and make you a victim of age discrimination”.
Why would junior reviewers toss the resume? Presumably, this expert believes that “junior” (or younger) resume reviewers discriminate against older job candidates, but reviewers who are not “junior” do not. In other words, this expert has learned that junior reviewers make mistakes in judging resumes that older workers do not.
Now if this expert has learned that older resume reviewers do a better job of judging resumes than younger reviewers, doesn’t it stand to reason that there are many, many hiring managers who appreciate the superior judgment of older workers?
I suspect this resume expert has little or no experience actually screening resumes and hiring people. I say so because, contrary to popular belief, hiring managers do NOT discriminate on the basis of age (or sex, color, race, etc.) as doing so would arbitrarily reduce the number of qualified candidates. It is hard enough to find well-qualified candidates to fill important positions, why make the task even harder by arbitrarily eliminating many of them?
Job seekers often tell me they get more interviews after they remove degree dates and some early jobs from their resume. When I ask if the increased number of interviews resulted in more job offers, the answer is always “no”.
It turns out that employers are actually quite rational. For a job with limited responsibility and requiring only moderate experience, the ideal candidate is one with minimal work experience and willing to work under less than ideal conditions, for low pay, in order to acquire more work experience.
For management positions with significant responsibilities, employers seek candidates with substantial breadth and depth of management and industry experience. For these positions, employers not only prefer older workers, younger workers won’t even be considered.
This is what you accomplish when you omit information in order to obscure your age: 1) more interviews for low-paying positions with negligible responsibility, and 2) fewer interviews for higher-paying positions requiring judgment, experience, industry knowledge, management skill, and wisdom.
