I first experienced age-ism at 30. Seriously. I applied for a job and there were people my age and older…but couldn’t get around the fact that THEY were higher up in the chain and that someone who is 30 just cannot be starting out because that is ‘wrong’…somehow. I am not inferring here…3 of them TOLD ME THAT TO MY FACE.
38…Diana…shit…you are right in there. At 50, unless you are an upper dog in your field you are in deep trouble. If you are over 55 and even an upper dog in your field you are screwed if you are looking for a job.
I may be cynical but I have seen it over and over and over again. I spent the first 7-8 years of my life teaching…and that is my backup plan right now…finding a 2-year school gig teaching math. I am not 55 yet but the time is rapidly approaching
Rereading it it comes off really harsh…but crap…it seems to be true.
I’m still reeling from 10 years ago…when I tried to hire a recent college grad…who happened to be 48 years old and the owner called me into his office and refused to let me…even though she was the only really truely qualified candidate. 10-11 years ago and it STILL pisses me off to this day.
I have been without full-time employment for over 2 years now. A lot of it is because I am over qualified. As Nava commented on, I have gotten good nibbles on resumes where I have omitted my MS and PhD. A friend of mine said that It’s only fraud if you lie on a resume. You chose what you want to put down.
Having worked in a human resource department for several years, this doesn’t always work. Some places are less likely to hire you if they perceive you as annoying. I’ve been told it is mostly a myth that people will hire you because they see you as “persistent.” I have personally only been hired once from calling a company on my own, after submitting an application/resume. I called ONCE, after two weeks. I got lucky because they were getting ready to call me that very day.
Other times not so much… why would they hire you for a position if they find you obnoxious and annoying?
It can backfire, for sure. And it’s not a magic bullet. But it can work. For example, at my last job we had a candidate that did not get the position, but asked to be informed of future positions. He wrote us a polite email once a week asking if there were any open positions. One came up, his name was fresh in our minds, so we called him in and he got the job.
If he had just left one note after his first interview, we surely would have forgotten him.
Yeah, I had it backfire on me once also. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine put me in touch with the hiring manager at a company I really wanted to work for. I sent them e-mails every once in a while when they had a job opening and I applied for it.
Anyway, one time they put out notice that were hiring for an especially coveted position. I was 90 percent sure that I wouldn’t get it, but I figured it was worth a shot anyways and inquired about it. The hiring manager sent back an e-mail pretty much saying they already had someone in mind for it, which I expected to be the case. So I sent back an e-mail thanking her for time and saying that if they had any openings in the future they think I might be qualified for to let me know. Well she then replied with a pretty terse e-mail saying she gets hundreds of inquiries, she didn’t have time to deal with me and that she would probably be transferred in a few months away. And that was the last official contact I had with that company. Just as well I suppose. They laid off a bunch of people last year.
The part that is really annoying is applying for the part time jobs at gas stations and stores and getting ignored or told they don’t want someone that is just going to quit when something better comes along. Then 2 months later they advertise again, the again in 3 months, then again, and again. While I sit here looking for anything that will bring in any money at all.
If they had just hired me in the first place, I would still be there and they would not be having to search again. Things are getting better here, but unemployment is still over 14% locally (and the drop last month was those of us that exhausted our benefits.) One company is looking to hire 50 people. They had over 3000 applicants. With those kinds of odds, I will still be working part-time in a year.
I think I am running into this problem, but I can’t get any hiring managers to admit it. I am 25, trying to get a desk job somewhere with my Masters in Criminal Justice, and can’t seem to get any call backs. I have almost four years of private security experience and three years of working as an intern at a police department. I don’t, however, particularly want to be a police officer, and am having trouble getting any call-backs at all for any desk jobs within my field. I so wish I’d gotten a business major, or at least gotten some low-level beat cop experience before getting my Masters.
I just want my own desk to do some paperwork job at, dammit. I’m smart and competent, and able to accomplish any job thrown my way. I’m just really tired of working my entry-level job for close to minimum wage with student loans coming due just around the corner. I just need to figure out how to get that on my resume to get hiring managers’ attentions.
Again, people seem to be approaching this problem as if they were the only person applying for the job. If a company is looking to hire 1 out of 100 applicants for a position, they want someone who is the best fit for the position. They don’t need the greatest person on the planet. To take a extreme example, if you are hiring for a cashier, you probably will hire the high school kid, not a NASA engineer even though the NASA guy is better educated and probably a lot more intelligent .
It’s not personal as if the company is conspiring to not hire you.
I concur. This sort of behavior strikes me as a bit dorkish-why would a good prospect keep nibbling at my workplace? If I can’t hire them right away, they can go elsewhere and be picked up. If nobody else wants them, why should I? What is wrong with them?
hh
But where was that job? I don’t think a single one of the factories where I’ve worked would have wanted someone like that; they’re not interested in bulldogs. A debts collection agency probably would.
Then follow up without being obnoxious or annoying.
For my new job, I probably had to follow up with the company over two dozen times before I was hired. And the first dozen times was just getting to know the head of my department so I would be in a position to get hired once a position became available.
To get hired in this job market, you need to be very aggressive. You don’t have to be obnoxious or annoying, but a casual “hey, I just wanted to follow up with you” doesn’t hurt. What’s the worst that could happen? They don’t hire you even more than they aren’t hiring you now?
Part of this may be that employers don’t want an employee (even a short-term temp) who’ll uproot stakes and leave without notice when an appropriate opportunity comes along, but part of it, too, is just that an employee who is underchallenged will be bored, dissatisfied, and will be constantly looking for more work to do. I know, it sounds stupid, but overqualified people are nearly as hard to deal with as underqualified ones; the type of work that is appropriate for, say, a 20 year engineer with an advanced degree requires a lot more of a manager to prepare and review than the sort of stuff you’d hand to an intern. Being in that situation is just as stressful for a manager.
I recently had an applicant for a position who, although not actually qualified for that job, had some great experience on resume and interviewed well on the phone. I’d have loved to hire him, but we didn’t have an approved requisition for his skill set, nor a specific role for him to fill, so I did the next best thing and forwarded his resume to my management with some highlighting and suggestions for the types of roles he could fill for us.
BTW, it is neither illegal nor unethical to not state education or other qualifications on a resume. The resume, after all, is supposed to demonstrate why you would be suited to a particular position, and as long as you’ll be satisfied in that position there is no harm in honestly tailoring it to fit that position, even if it means leaving off some experience. Of course, you’ll probably be asked to fill in some gaps, and that may be an awkward conversation, but for a truly unskilled job like retail, you can give any reasonably accurate but vague answer and the interviewer may keep going if you are otherwise better suited than other applicants.
