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5 Things on Your Resume That Make You Sound Too Old

by Marc Miller

Your Home Address

For many years, we sent our resume and cover letter through the mail. We put our home address right on the top. Fact is, there is no longer a need to put your home address on the resume anymore.

There are other reasons not to include your home address:

Economic profiling

Length of commute

Personal safety

If the employer needs your home mailing address, they can ask for it.

Your Email Address

One sure sign that you are over 50 is to have an AOL email address, or even an email address from your cable provider like RR.com on your resume.

Either sign up for a Gmail address or get an email forwarding service from:

A professional society – I have had email addresses from IEEE and ACM, both
technology associations.

Your alumni association – I have an email address from my Northwestern Alumni Association.

Get your own domain – I have one client who acquired his full name as a
domain name, like MarcMiller.com.

All of these options say something about your professional brand. I always recommend using a separate email address for your job search.

Your Home Phone Number

Who under 45 years of age still has a home phone? We ditched our home phone five years ago, and I am quite a bit older than 45. If you still have a home phone and do not want to give out your cell phone number, get a Google Voice number. Put the Google Voice number on your resume as your cell number. You can set it up so that it will ring on multiple phones (both home and cell). It can be configured to transcribe the message, and then email and text you the transcription. But just a warning – some of the transcriptions can be really funny. I had one recruiter leave me a message and her name was transcribed as “stressed out waters.”

A Double Space After Period

I am going to go out on a limb and declare that putting two spaces after a period is obsolete. It is how most of us were taught to type on a typewriter. Therefore, most of us who do this (I have taught myself to stop putting two spaces after a period, and it was hard) are over 50 years of age.

Over the years, I have heard that this has been used as a method of screening out older candidates.

Your Skills

Limit the skills you list on your resume to current and relevant skills. I have seen many technical resumes that list every system, software program and technology that the applicant has ever worked on.

I could list that I wrote MS-DOS control programs, wrote machine level code developing word processors, managed IBM mainframe computers and lots of other obsolete technologies. Unless I was applying for a position that required those skills, all it tells the reader is I am over 50 years of age and maybe older.

Look at your resume – what does it say about your age? Show it to others and ask them what it says about you.


marc-miller1

Marc Miller is the founder of Career Pivot, which helps Baby Boomers design careers they can grow into for the next 30 years.

COPYRIGHT 2014 MARC MILLER, CAREER PIVOT

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION

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Comments

  • steve wolff says:

    Fun article! From a guy over 50, that is. Interesting that my iPhone autocorrect morphs 2 spaces at the end of a sentence into period space.
    cheers, sw

  • Joy says:

    I abhor this age relevancy thing yet I see where some companies my find it unacceptable for lack of a better word. I don’t think we’re passe,we don’t have ADD & A lot of us are grammatically correct! We also aim to do things from start to finish and correctly. What am I missing??

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