St.Louis Business Journal
COPING WITH AGE DISCRIMINATION REQUIRES OUTSMARTING YOUNGER COMPETITORS

By Anna Navarro

January 2006  

Author's note: Client stories in this column are based on actual situations fictionalized to protect privacy and told with permission.

Frank was vice president of marketing and 52 when his company was sold and he was laid off. He had been in charge of advertising, public relations and marketing research for the firm for nearly 30 years. His severance package gave him 14 months of income.

Being laid off is always traumatic but it can be especially difficult for people approaching or beyond the age of 50. Employers are sometimes reluctant to hire candidates over 50 because of their prior salary. Less experienced (read less expensive) candidates may be able to do the job well enough to justify the cost savings. And even if more seasoned workers were willing to take lower salaries, employers often hesitate to hire them for fear they would become discontented in the long run.

A frequent solution for those 50 and up is self-employment. But some people aren't cut out to be self-employed, and Frank was one of them. So the only solution for him was to be smarter about job hunting than his younger competitors.

Being smarter starts with acknowledging there are some employers who will simply not consider you because of age. It's not fair, and I'm not defending the practice. But the more easily you can let go of them and move on, the more energy and time you will have to find employers who value experience and perspective.

A smart job hunt also requires demonstrating to employers in your resume and in every interaction with them that you understand what their needs are and can meet them better than a less experienced person.

How do you do that? Start from the inside. Analyze what you want in a job and what you have to offer employers that only experience can bring them. Explore a variety of career paths until you can pinpoint with clarity the type of job you are targeting.

At the outset of our work together Frank and I did a thorough self-assessment to pinpoint what he wanted to do. As he analyzed himself he realized what he enjoyed most was public relations. He also liked managing a small professional team, but wanted to avoid responsibility for overseeing large groups of people from whom he was removed by two or three management levels. He was good at sales and enjoyed it, and had many high level contacts.

Putting all these clues together, we decided he would aim at becoming a public relations account executive. After he made this decision, we put together a resume and self-presentation.

The next step in outsmarting other candidates is to study the job you are after in detail by talking to people who do it and those to whom it reports. The idea is to ask for candid advice about your age, the assets you think you bring to the job, whether employers would value them or not, and to discuss how to present yourself for maximum appeal.

Frank set up a series of meetings with people in public relations to get feedback on how he was coming across. He probed to discover if there were any ways his age and experience could be a plus and learned that employers would highly value his contacts in the community.

We then used this "inside intelligence" to shape his resume, his self-presentation and his cover letters. He also coached his references, politely and appropriately, about what he had to offer that employers seemed to value most so they too knew what to emphasize in their conversations about him.

It took him 18 months to find a job. He got relatively few interviews from want ads or Internet searches, perhaps because employers put him in the "discard" pile after estimating his age. He fared much better when he networked with people in the field. He learned of several openings and was on the short list of candidates several times.

The position he ultimately got was with a national public relations firm that had a small presence in the city where he lived and wanted to grow it. He came on board as the number two person in the office.

It wasn't an easy search but he succeeded because he was focused, understood what employers wanted, presented himself as a person who could meet their needs and didn't get stopped in his tracks with anger when he got unfairly eliminated. That's the recipe for outsmarting other candidates, regardless of your age.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.