Why 40-year-olds are becoming 30-year olds on their resumes

When Lily, a marketing strategist in Montreal, wrapped a long-term work contract in the fall of 2024, she immediately hit the ground running, applying to multiple jobs a day. Six months and more than 500 applications later, she had nothing to show for her efforts but a few fruitless interviews and a whole lot of radio silence.

When she hired a resume consultant for advice on getting her applications noticed, she expected she'd get formatting hacks or a crash course in keywords. Instead, the expert told Lily to scrub all but the last decade from her CV and LinkedIn page, effectively erasing more than half of her 25-year career history and her college graduation date. It was less about streamlining her qualifications than lying by omission. The consultant explained that the point was to appear younger than her age. A few friends in their 30s had already given Lily the same advice; one of them, more than a decade Lily's junior, had just landed a dream job in marketing after making similar revisions to her own application.

Though she felt conflicted about it, Lily — who is now 48 and using a pseudonym to prevent professional retribution — went ahead with the recommended edits. The interviews immediately started rolling in. "It was like all of a sudden, the sun came out and everything cleared up," she says.

Across TikTok, LinkedIn, and wherever resume advice is on offer, jobseekers are being urged to hide their ages to get hired. More and more workers, such as Lily, are heeding the recommendation.

Workplace ageism is nothing new, particularly for those over 50 and women in general. But amid an ongoing white-collar recession, who's seen as too old has gotten younger. Workers are catching on: Glassdoor reported a 133% year over year increase in jobseekers' mentions of ageism between the first quarter of 2024 and Q1 2025, a surge that may be explained by research showing that reports of age-related hiring and firing grow in tandem with unemployment rates.

Coming out of the pandemic, workers in their 30s and 40s were in their professional prime. Now, many of those same mid-career workers find themselves in a job market no-man's-land, not yet calcified into the corporate establishment but no longer synonymous with "the future" of business and work. All the while, many are seeing their roles get bulldozed in the great flattening of middle management.

When people who are ostensibly in their peak earning years can no longer reliably find or keep a job across industries, the established ethics and expectations of the labor market start to lose their relevance. When experience no longer matters, what does? In this upside-down reality, resume Botox has become a rational strategy for survival.

Much of today's job market runs on fear. Companies dread making costly mistakes that could derail their business, while hiring managers worry that the wrong staffing choice might cost them their jobs. And workers are adapting to those fears by reverse-aging their resumes.

"What I'm seeing more and more is not that people will lie about their age and outright say they're 28 when they're 38, but that they will imply they're younger by cutting off the earliest pieces of their resume," says Josh Bob, a career adviser in Boston. It's a tactical response to a job environment where employers want candidates who can perform immediately, rather than workers with cumulative skillsets they can learn to apply.

"You would figure that somebody who has 25 or 35 years of experience would actually be quicker to get up to speed because they've learned more things than somebody who has only 10 years of experience, but that's not how hiring managers are perceiving things," Bob says. "Instead, hiring managers are thinking, 'I need somebody who was doing this exact job yesterday.'"

In other words, employers seek what Bob calls "the Goldilocks candidate": someone who's not too young, not too old, and ideally poached from a competitor. Career consultants have long advised older jobseekers to pare down their work histories and, in some cases, to try appearing younger by dyeing their hair or getting Botox. But until now, people in their 30s and 40s could largely expect to be spared this indignity. The sudden shift reflects a pattern of employer risk aversion that's preventing the very youngest workers from gaining a foothold in the workforce and penalizing professional experience.

Jessica Ehlers, an HR professional in Minneapolis, points out that compensation is also a factor. "I think more employers are just trying to stay within a budget, so when they see 20 or 30 years of experience on a resume they might think, 'That's going to be extra expensive.'" Instead of being upfront about their budgetary constraints, some companies' recruitment processes are set up to preemptively weed out these potentially costly candidates. In effect, that means squeezing out "more people in the 40 and up range," Ehlers says.

AI-powered hiring platforms may be exacerbating the problem, as a growing body of research suggests large language models absorb and reproduce existing cultural prejudice. A new Stanford study on how generative AI characterizes workers across industries, for example, found that ChatGPT outputs showed a clear bias against older working women and young people.

Workers have been taking some of the recruitment companies to court. In late January, a lawsuit was filed against Eightfold AI — whose technology is used by companies such as Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Starbucks, and Paypal — alleging that its "opaque" data and methodology for ranking job candidates should be subject to disclosure under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Last May, a federal judge advanced a collective-action lawsuit against the recruitment giant Workday, explicitly citing plausible age discrimination against candidates 40 and older. Workday has consistently denied the claims.

Even when it's unintentional, discriminating against older workers is against the law. In the US, workers 40 and up are covered by the federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which covers overt age discrimination as well as unconscious bias that's baked into hiring practices under a provision called 'disparate impact.' An example case, says Linda Ashar, an associate law professor at American Public University System and an employment lawyer for more than 30 years, would be, "a company policy capping new hires at five years' experience could disproportionately exclude otherwise qualified older applicants protected under the ADEA, and even chill them from applying at all."

The problem is that disparate impact can be tricky to prove. Ashar explains that the law allows people to point to big-picture patterns, such as hiring rules that seem neutral but end up filtering out older workers. That can include things like asking for "recent graduates," setting quiet age limits, using criteria that skew young, or making comments about wanting someone younger.

The ADEA's scope of coverage has its own limits. Most notably, it doesn't protect workers under 40.

Some states and cities have laws that extend age-discrimination protection to younger workers. However, those laws are generally framed to prevent reverse age discrimination, where an employer explicitly favors older workers at the exclusion of younger ones.

What that effectively means is that there's scant legal recourse for workers in their 30s who are perceived as too old, too expensive, or not junior enough due to market dynamics.

Having peeked behind the curtain, Ehlers now knows those workers' struggle firsthand. She was recently laid off by her employer of 3 and a half years and, at 37, believes ageism has already informed her experience. In her view, poor HR practices are becoming normalized and widespread, reinforcing discriminatory trends.

Now on the other side of the hiring process, she's approaching the search for a new job with resigned pragmatism. She won't edit her three master's degrees out of her resume — she worked too hard for those — but she's seen the effects of scrapping other experience. "After only listing 10 years on my resume, I've had a lot easier time getting into interviews," Ehlers says, and advises others in her position to do the same.

For younger workers holding tightly to their current roles, Ehlers offers a separate word of wisdom: "Look around and pay attention to who is getting laid off at your company. If you see the same age groups affected over and over, know it could happen to you. You won't be young forever."

It took five more months and another few hundred applications, but Lily eventually landed a new corporate marketing job. As soon as she did, she came clean about her age, replacing the missing years on her LinkedIn profile and in her company's internal database.

"The person who hired me said, 'Oh, we thought you were in your late 30s,'" Lily says. She read it as confirmation that the truth would have gotten her nowhere.

Though she is grateful to be back in the workforce, it's not the happy ending she'd hoped for. Her new role is too junior and the pay is too small. More than anything, Lily can't shake her resentment over having had to conceal years of experience — in work and life lived — to get hired: "I'm only in my late 40s. I'm vibrant. I have energy. I can get work done. I don't feel like I should be hiding it." Sometimes, she imagines what it would be like to have a job where she's celebrated for all that she brings to the table — "a job that appreciates me for me."

Kelli María Korducki is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.