4 Tips to Look Younger on Your Resume

Because of the illegal yet persistent practice of age discrimination in hiring, many seasoned job seekers want to appear younger on their resumes.The impulse is understandable, but many prospective employees go about resume editing in ways that are ineffective and make their resumes look as if they are attempting to hide something from prospective employers.

As a job seeker, if you do wish to look younger on your resume, here are some ways how:

1. Set up a Gmail Account - Emails that are AOL.com, yahoo.com or other domains that are not as well known are signs (regardless of reality) that a job seeker is not up to date on current technological trends.
Not that Gmail is a newfangled addition to the email rolls, but nearly every young job seeker that sends their resume to our office uses the Google e-mail platform.

2. The Titles of Your 1st and 2nd Job - Many older job seekers who wish to appear younger truncate some of their first jobs on their resumes, yet still give away their experience range by having the first listed title be some form of managerial or senior level position.
When more seasoned job seekers end up doing so, it seems as if they may be hiding something such as their age or even past experience. This could translate into looking insecure to the resume reader.

3. Knowledge of Technology and Social Media - Many experienced job seekers are failing to keep up with new technological and social media / marketing trends. Since the demand for hiring companies to have individuals who can implement things such as blogs, website updates and working on iOS or Mac computers, job seekers who know these things look younger on paper, and more intelligent than those who simply know Windows and MS Office (an expected minimum).

Therefore, if you don't know Mac operating systems and blog content management systems such as Wordpress, not only do you look older, you are simply not as competitive as those who do, regardless of experience level. Unfortunately, you might also look lazy: the Mac OS is notoriously user-friendly.

4. Stating Number of Years In Your Resume Objective - Many job seekers who wish to look younger fall short in their resume objective by putting the number of years of experience that they have regardless if they implement a "+" sign.
This means that putting phrases like "Experienced marketing professional with 15+ years of retail marketing experience seeks job in," is only going to make the resume reader wonder the exact value of "+" on your CV.

In the end, age discrimination in hiring is as commonplace as it is illegal. Write off the discriminatory parties as a bad working environment anyway, and focus on the fact that any hiring party worth their salt will be looking at knowledge, qualifications, and compensation level. Communicate these clearly and predominantly enough, and the resume reader will entirely forget to read into your age range.