Career Warrior Podcast 311) FAQ Mailbag: Age Discrimination, Career Breaks, Cover Letters, and More

Episode Transcript

Chris Villanueva 0:00
Move forward if you’re not getting the results that you deserve in your job search, or if you’ve been rejected so many times, now is the time to keep moving forward. And welcome to the Let’s Eat, Grandma Career Warrior Podcast! If your goal is to transition to more meaningful work achieve better pay or that flow state at work, this is your podcast. My name is Chris Villanueva, and I’m the host of the show and today we’re going to discuss age discrimination, career gaps and cover letter pizzazz, other things like this that you the job seeker are asking.

Now I made a commitment earlier to personally answer as many questions as I could. So with this, you will notice I am reading some actual questions that came through on my inbox or my LinkedIn comments and things like that. So I would encourage you as a job seeker or Career Warrior to follow me on LinkedIn and leave me your two cents because we have our ears to the ground. And we truly want to address the things that you care about and the things that make a difference for you in your job search.

You’ll also notice that I did not release an episode last week and that is not by mistake. I’m actually going to be reducing episodes to every other week instead of weekly because I am making a personal commitment to improve as a podcaster and engage even further. So I’m going to be doing more research and getting with my boots to the ground so to speak and connecting with you as a fellow listener. You may even see some live meetups here in Austin, Texas, and possibly New York where I might travel. With that being said, let’s kick into today’s mailbag.

The first question is about age discrimination. Sadly, a lot of job seekers are worried about age discrimination, they typically feel like the resume is getting thrown out because, heck, I have too much of experience or I’m considered quote “too old.” Now let me address this head on. So there’s two ways to tackle this question: there is hiding your age on a resume, and there is facing age discrimination head on and actually dealing with it.

The first one is an easier question to answer. So how do I hide age so to speak, which is something that I hate even saying it feels dirty coming from my mouth, because that’s not my goal, at the end of the day to have you hide your age. But folks in the past have employed tricks such as removing graduation date from the resume, something that you could do, it’s a possibility. Another thing that you can do is convert years of experience. So if you put, “I have 20, 30 years of experience in XYZ,” you can change that to extensive or detailed experience and XYZ. Another thing you could do is modernize the design just a little bit. And no, I’m not talking about putting your picture on it and just a bunch of different crazy logos and designs that look quote, modern, what I’m talking about is just cleaning up that design and not letting this thing spill on over to five, six pages of clunky content. I would advise that anyway. And I think that’s a good segue to dealing with age discrimination head on.

In fact, I think the broader problem is companies that are discriminating on the basis of age, I would never recommend you as the job seeker to apply or work for a company that does not welcome your years of expertise in your age. This is something that you know, it irks me, and it’s it bothers me that I get asked this pretty much every single day through our company. But why would you want to try to land a job and “get past age discrimination” if you’re going to more than likely be dealing with it with a company culture anyway. So I encourage you to seek out companies that are diverse in terms of how they hire and you know, don’t try to, quote, hide your age just so you can finally get in.

Another thing that I kind of come back to when it comes to age discrimination is there was an insightful podcast guest I had who spoke about age discrimination. And this person had built up an amazing career and they were in the tech space, this person was not, you know, 20s 30s, even 40s, I believe, but they were in the tech space and had made themselves so darn relevant to all the new things that were up and coming and as you know, tech, AI etc is such a quick shifting landscape. There’s so much that changes and they recommended instead of focusing on worrying about age discrimination itself, focus on keeping your skills up to date and letting that confidence and all of those things resonate and show forth in your resume and show forth in the interview. That is probably the best piece of advice that I’ve heard in regards to dealing with age discrimination is keep up to date with your skills and have it move forward. Have your job search move forward that way.

And again, with what I said earlier, you don’t want to include too much and accidentally disqualify yourself by overqualified yourself. So if you have you know, five, six pages this may look have like too much or a hiring manager. And instead of age discrimination being the problem, the problem may actually be the fact that no one can actually figure out what is applicable for the job posting. So really focusing on cutting that resume down to your best stuff is what I will steer you to doing.

Alright, moving on. This question is interesting. Somebody says, “Chris, if you have a minute, here’s a question, would you say it is a good idea to include hyperlinks in cover letters? As a Content Creator, I have a lot of specific examples to evidence claims, but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to include them.” But I say is cool idea why not? The whole point of the cover letter is to supplement the resume and include things that the resume can’t necessarily do. Now, what I would say about that is personality stories and even examples serve, I think, as the purpose of cover letters. And so when it comes to the umbrella of examples, and showing not telling, which is something I’ve spoken about in the past, I think hyperlinks and showcasing those websites, I think that’s a great idea. Because you give somebody an avenue to further engage with you. Now, what I would say is, you can even take that a step further and go beyond just the cover letter, and heck, why not the resume, the document that gets the most read time and include those hyperlinks if you find it to be something that’s worth sharing?

Alright, the next question is about LinkedIn recommendations. This person says, “My question about recommendations is this: In going about giving others recommendations, should you message the individual first, or is a recommendation — assuming it’s appropriate and well written — always appreciated?“ I love this question. Because I have some experience within this realm, I actually do recommend messaging that individual first because you don’t want to waste your time or they’re not up and ready for the recommendation. Recommendations take time, at least good ones. So if you want to write somebody’s recommendation, I found that it’s good to have that conversation perhaps offline or through email first, like, “Hey, can I write you a recommendation?” because some people don’t check their LinkedIn first of all, as often as you think that they do. So I’ve written LinkedIn recommendations for folks in the past, and people just don’t see it on their notifications, or they don’t pop. So I would recommend just messaging that person beforehand. And after that, getting that LinkedIn recommendation sent.

Alright, this next question is super interesting. So I’m going to riff on it a little bit more. This person says, speaking about the LinkedIn Career Break Feature, this has to do not only with that feature, but I think for those who are dealing with a career gap, or have had a career break. They said, “Since you mentioned it, there has been something on my mind lately about a feature LinkedIn has been promoting, that is adding a Career Break Section to your LinkedIn profile, which allows you to explain your side of the situation and what you’ve learned during the break. The question is, what are your thoughts for adding a career break section to your LinkedIn profile? LinkedIn seems to encourage it, but several others I’ve chatted with have mixed feelings, some like it where others don’t trust it. One comment I received was placing a break on your LinkedIn profile will work negatively with the algorithm or search results as your profile might gets pressed with hiring managers scanning the network, which could be a major downer here. So question is, should I include that career break? Or should I not?”

It’s not an easy one for me to answer because there are 1007 different reasons why somebody might be going through a career break and 1009 different ways a career break could help or hurt your case, and it kind of applies to the individual. But, I can give you some framework, a framework to think about your career gap, or your career break and whether or not that adds value to you as the job seeker. And instead of, you know, commenting on the algorithm, because I’ve met with some of the people from LinkedIn, and not even employees at LinkedIn can give answers to the algorithm because these things are not shared openly and publicly. But I can answer a little bit more generally, when you look at the LinkedIn premium search filters and I’ll link a description to how you could use LinkedIn as a recruiter. And what you can filter people by I don’t see career break as an obvious it’s not there. I couldn’t find it. And I haven’t seen it as an obvious way that folks can filter out and weed out people so

I’m not too concerned about the whole career break thing and people unchecking it saying I don’t want people who have career breaks in fact, I think LinkedIn would hate that. Anyway, given their stance on career breaks in an article entitled, “LinkedIn members can now spotlight career breaks in their profiles” for March 2022. It says for talent professionals, these highlighted pauses will show up in recruiter when they search for candidates, you’ll be able to see how the life experiences and skills people have built, while they are away will match the skills that you’re looking for in your open roles. So it looks like there is some sort of influence on how jobseekers come up when it comes to the career break feature.

But I think the more are important questions to answer algorithm or not, is whether or not you need to showcase your career break. Listen, I love the fact that LinkedIn is, I’d say pretty future minded when it comes to helping job seekers and letting in really normalizing. It’s a career gaps and career breaks, there’s so many different darn good reasons why somebody might have a career break, maybe you just needed time to consider where you’re going next, maybe your travel was a life changing experience for you that can apply for your career, you know, maybe you took time to raise a family, I don’t know what the reason is, and I appreciate LinkedIn effort. However, if it doesn’t resonate with you, then I don’t necessarily recommend showcasing that career gap in a resume or a LinkedIn profile.

The purpose, at least in LinkedIn’s eyes, is to show that you brought a fresh perspective, new skills and new energy. This is directly from that LinkedIn article about why they released this feature. So if none of that resonates with you, if this is just like a career break that you couldn’t competently sell, or talk about, then I’m not really going to say this is something that you should showcase in your LinkedIn profile, or your resume. So consider that greatly. And I’ll give you some stats here. This again comes from that same article, which I will link in this podcast episode, it says to understand more about career breaks, we surveyed nearly 23,000 workers and more than 7,000 hiring managers and found that two thirds of employees have taken a break, so you shouldn’t feel alone there at some point in their professional career, and just over a third, 35% Mostly women would like to take a career break in their future. Yet, even with career breaks becoming more popular, some hiring managers are still hesitant to pursue those who have taken a break.

Indeed, one in five hiring managers say that they outright reject such candidates. But we’re also seeing a shift in that perspective, we found that nearly half of employers believe candidates with career breaks are an untapped talent pool. So one half, nearly one half of employers believe that this is seen as a good thing and like a positive thing. So the data is still, I would say not clear on whether blanket career breaks are great are always going to be seen as as a good thing. In fact, I’d say it’s pretty darn close to 50/50. So I will strengthen and emphasize what I said at the beginning, which is if this is something that you can sell, and this is something that resonates with you that it brings new fresh perspective and energy and skills to you as a job seeker and your career, then by all means go for it. But if not, if this is something that you’re just kind of haphazardly thinking, Okay, I’ll include it because LinkedIn says, “Don’t do it, I don’t think it’s going to be worth your time or help you in your job search.”

So I went a little bit long in that last one, because I know it’s a big deal. I think for a lot of people, and we covered cover letters, career gaps, we covered age discrimination. And one last thing that I would leave you with as a job seeker is continue persisting. I know I’ve said it so many times here on this podcast, move forward, if you’re not getting the results that you deserve in your job search, or if you’ve been rejected so many times, now is the time to keep moving forward. And I think now, especially as we enter into a very strange time into the job market, folks are having a little bit more competition, people are getting a little a bit discouraged, I think when it comes to the application process. But this is a single point in time that will pass your uncertainty regarding the job search and your results. So I promise you a great career ahead of you. If you just get clear on where you’re headed next, get those application documents tightened up and move forth confidently, I promise you that there’s a great job out there for you. So I’ll leave you with that.

And I want to say thank you to those who submit their questions and let me know their feedback about the podcast. I would again encourage you to follow me on LinkedIn and comment and engage because we are reading every single comment and message and even though I don’t respond very quickly, I know I haven’t been great about that because I receive a lot of junk. I do read everything so continue sending me your comments and questions and you just may see it make this podcast.

Alright, Career Warriors. I cannot wait for you to reconnect in two weeks from now we have an amazing past guest of the podcast and she is bringing such fresh perspective and going to help you think about your career change and how to get clear and brave so make sure to set a calendar reminder and two weeks from now because it’s going to be a game changing episode. Alright, Career Warriors. Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode. I will see you next time in the Career Warrior Podcast where your podcasts or your podcast or your pod.