A(nother) word about ageism

I watched a webinar recently that was all about ageism in the hiring process. The job search expert stressed that age discrimination is wrong and illegal. But, she said, it exists and is rampant. So, here’s what you, the job candidate, need to do. Don’t lead with your age. Focus on your recent relevant experience. Don’t include experience from over 15 years ago. And every time she shared a tip, she’d add, “I know age discrimination is illegal, but it exists.”

I left that webinar feeling two things: (1) The tips were helpful. I’ve used many of them myself and have shared them with clients. (2) There’s something wrong with this approach.

Certainly, DEI work — including attacking ageism — is something we ALL need to embrace. But the problem of ageism in the workplace is a problem that hiring managers, HR directors, Chief People Officers, and CEOs need to put front and center in their work. It’s not a problem that a job applicant can fix by tinkering with dates on a resume, hiding years of experience, and (for women) worrying about the gray in their hair. I write this with some chagrin. As a thirty-year-old director in a non-profit in the early 1990s, I probably was as guilty of ageism as the thirty-year-old hiring managers shooting down my fifty-year-old clients are today.

So, yes, if you are over 50 in the job search and you needed a new job yesterday, then follow those tips. I get it: for the last job I considered, I took my college graduation year off my resume. If you need a job, any job, right now, do what you need to do (within ethical bounds, of course) to get that job. For those of us not job seeking, in positions of power to make change, or just too fed up, please don’t stop talking about ageism. And don’t act like we have to put up with this. Because putting up with something often turns into enabling.

I don’t want to work, ever, for any place that thinks I’m too old to learn, that thinks I’m overqualified, or that worries I wouldn’t be the right cultural fit. If I must hide who I am — and that’s a sixty-year-old woman who took eleven years out of full-time paid work to raise her son — then I’m not working with you. And I want the same for my clients. I don’t want them to diminish who they are in any way when they’re searching for a new job.

One of things I love about my son and his friends (all born in the mid-1990s) is that they seem to care most about authenticity. Maybe it’s because they grew up in world that let them down in so many ways, I don’t know. It’s time we talk authentically about ageism in the workplace. It’s time that we ask companies to include ageism as another bias to address in DEI work. And, it’s time that HR offices look closely at who is being interviewed and what kind of implicit bias is happening.