In today's shaky job market, lying on your resume has become a sensible survival strategy.
When Lily, a marketing strategist from Montreal, finished her long-term contract in the fall of 2024, she immediately started looking for a new job, sending out several applications a day. After six months and over 500 applications, she had only a few fruitless conversations and enormous silence from her employers.
When she asked a CV consultant to help her stand out from the candidates, she expected formatting tips or a crash course in keyword selection. Instead, the expert advised Lily to she removed everything from her resume and LinkedIn except the last decade of work — thus erasing more than half of his 25-year career and his graduation date. It was no longer a question of simplifying experience, but of lying through silence. The consultant explained that the goal is to make her look younger than she actually is. Several of Lily's thirty-something friends had already suggested a similar solution to her; one of them — more than a decade younger than Lily — landed her dream job in marketing after making similar tweaks to her application.
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Despite her internal conflict, Lily – now 48 years old and using a pseudonym to avoid professional consequences – decided to make the recommended changes. Job interviews came almost immediately. — It was as if the sun suddenly came out and everything brightened up – he says.
On TikTok, LinkedIn and wherever CV advice is given, job candidates are increasingly encouraged to hide their age to improve their chances of getting hired. More and more people, like Lily, are following these tips.
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Why experience is starting to harm candidates
Ageism in the workplace is nothing new, especially towards people over 50 and women. However, in times of ongoing recession among white-collar workers, the line of “too old” is moving lower and lower. Employees are starting to notice: Glassdoor reported a 133% increase. an increase in mentions of ageism among job applicants between the first quarters of 2024 and 2025 – which may be related to research showing that reports of age discrimination increase as unemployment increases.
After the pandemic, people in their 30s and 40s were at the peak of their professional abilities. Now many of them find themselves in a vacuum on the labor market – not yet settled in corporate structures, but no longer identified with the “future” of business and work. In the meantime, their positions often disappear as a result of the massive flattening of structures and the liquidation of middle management.
When people, theoretically in the most favorable period of their career, can no longer confidently find or maintain a job in various industries, the existing principles and ethics of the labor market lose their meaning. If experience no longer matters, what does? In this upside-down world, “Botox” on your CV has become a rational survival strategy.
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A job market based on fear: companies want “ready for yesterday”
Today's job market is driven by fear. Companies are afraid of costly mistakes that may affect their future, and recruiters are afraid that a bad HR decision will result in them losing their position. Employees adapt to this atmosphere by “rejuvenating” their CVs.
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“I'm seeing more and more that people are not so much outright lying about their age and not outright claiming to be 28 when they really are 38, but rather they are implying a younger age by cutting out the oldest points on their resume,” says Josh Bob, a career counselor in Boston. This is a tactical response to the reality that employers want candidates who are ready to act immediately, not necessarily those with a wealth of skills acquired over the years.
Recruiters think: I need someone who can do it yesterday.
—Josh Bob, guidance counselor
– You might think that someone with 25 or 35 years of experience would be able to take on new responsibilities faster because they know more than someone with 10 years of experience, but recruiters see it completely differently, says Bob. — Recruiters tend to think, “I need someone who did exactly the same thing yesterday.”
In other words, employers are looking for – as Bob says – “the perfect candidate”: not too young, not too old, preferably taken over from the competition. Career consultants have long advised older people to shorten their resumes, and sometimes even suggested visual “rejuvenation” — hair dyeing or Botox. So far, however, people in their thirties and forties have avoided this unpleasant necessity. The sudden change reflects the growing risk aversion among employers, which makes it difficult for the youngest to start and punishes experienced ones for their achievements.
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AI and corporate budgets fuel the spiral of ageism
Jessica Ehlers, an HR specialist from Minneapolis, points out that decisions are also influenced by financial issues. — More and more companies are trying to stay within budget, so when they see 20 or 30 years of experience, they think: “This will be an expensive employee.” — Instead of talking openly about budget constraints, some companies design recruitment in such a way as to eliminate potentially more expensive candidates in advance. As a result, Ehlers says, “people in their 40s and older are crumbling.”
AI-powered recruiting platforms may be making the problem worse as more and more research shows that large language models absorb and replicate existing cultural biases. A new Stanford study on generative AI and its employee evaluations across industries found, for example, that ChatGPT clearly discriminates against older women and very young people.
Employees began to sue recruitment companies. In late January, a lawsuit was filed against Eightfold AI, a technology used by companies such as Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Starbucks and Paypal. It accused her that “opaque” data and methods for ranking applicants should be subject to disclosure under fair credit reporting laws. Last May, a federal judge allowed a class-action lawsuit against recruiting giant Workday, explicitly alleging likely discrimination against applicants over 40. Workday has consistently denied these allegations.
Even if unintentional, it is illegal to discriminate against older workers. In the USA, people over 40 are protected by the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which covers both open discrimination and unconscious biases in recruitment processes – in accordance with the so-called the principle of “indirect discrimination”. As Linda Ashar, a law professor and employment attorney at the American Public University System for over 30 years, explains: “A company's policy of limiting new hires to those with no more than five years of experience may effectively exclude qualified, older candidates protected by ADEA regulations and even discourage them from applying.”
The problem is that proving indirect discrimination can be difficult. Ashar explains that the law allows pointing to general patterns, e.g. recruitment rules that seem neutral but in fact eliminate older candidates. This concerns, for example, the requirements for “fresh graduates”, informal age limits, criteria favoring younger people or comments about the need to employ someone younger.
However, the scope of ADEA protection has its limitations. Most important: it does not cover employees under 40 years of age.
Some states and cities in the US have laws extending ageism protections to younger workers. However, most often they are designed to prevent the so-called reverse discrimination, i.e. a situation in which the employer prefers older employees at the expense of younger employees.
In practice, this means that people over thirty, considered “too old”, “too expensive” or “not junior enough” due to the market situation, have little room to fight for their rights.
When the truth gets in the way of employment: The personal cost of concealing age
Jessica Ehlers, who saw the recruitment mechanisms from the inside, now experiences the problem herself. She was recently laid off after 3.5 years of work and believes that ageism is already affecting her professional situation, even though she is only 37 years old. In her opinion, bad HR practices are becoming the norm, deepening the phenomenon of discrimination.
Now on the other side of the recruitment process, he approaches his job search with a pragmatic distance. She doesn't intend to remove three master's degrees from her CV – they cost her too much – but she sees the effects of omitting older experience. – When I included only the last decade on my CV, it was much easier for me to get interviews, she says, and advises others in a similar situation to do the same.
He advises younger employees: – Look around and pay attention to who is being laid off in your company. If you see this happening to the same age groups over and over again, remember that this could happen to you too. You won't be young forever.
It took Lily another five months and hundreds more applications, but she finally landed a new corporate job in marketing. As soon as she got it, she revealed her real age, restoring missing career years on LinkedIn and the company's internal database.
“The person who hired me said, 'We thought you were in your late 30s,'” Lily recalls. She took it as confirmation that the truth would do her no good.
She's happy to be back at work, but it's not the ending she dreamed of. The new position is too low and the pay is too low. What hurts her most, however, is having to hide years of experience – professional and life – in order to get a job: – I'm only less than 50 years old. I'm full of energy. I can work. I don't feel like I have to hide it. — Sometimes she imagines what it would be like to have a job that appreciated every advantage she had – “a job that values me for who I really am.”
The article is a translation from the American version of Business Insider.
