Job Search Expert Shares The One Piece Of Information You Should Immediately Delete From Your Resume
It puts you in a box and makes it easy for employers to dismiss your skills. Get rid!
Vlada Karpovich | Canva Pro There is nothing worse than having to write a resume. Depending on your career level, there's either too little or way too much information, and you have to figure out how to expand or distill it in EXACTLY the right way while also making it appealing to a literal robot inside an applicant tracking system. It's a nightmare.
But among the myriad resume pitfalls is a tiny detail most of us reflexively include that experts say can often make your job search that much more difficult — which is silly because it doesn't even need to be there!
A job search expert says the one detail to delete from your resume immediately is your graduation date.
You know how it goes — everything on a resume has a date. Every job and volunteer position has a start and end date, and that goes for your education credentials, too. Class of fill-in-the-blank, right?
But Jerry Lee, a job search expert whose business Wonsulting helps job seekers with all aspects of career development, says that little graduation year needs to go, now. And while you're at it, delete it from LinkedIn and everything else, too.
For starters, your graduation year makes it easy for employers to discriminate against you based on age.
This is far more of a concern for those of us who are a bit long in the tooth, but it's a very real phenomenon. Age discrimination in hiring is rampant, and it begins far earlier in life than you'd ever expect. You're protected from it under federal law starting at just age 40, which is only halfway through your career, after all.
A study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that nearly one-third of HR and hiring professionals said that age had factored into their decision on whether or not to hire a candidate. And research has also shown that a similar proportion of workers have felt discriminated against based on age.
StockLite | Canva Pro
But even if there's nobody actively discriminating, the bias is very real. In 2017, I lost my job, but the market was good and I had a killer resume and thought I'd have no trouble at all. 250 job apps and one, single, solitary interview later, I was crestfallen.
A friend in HR was willing to level with me. "If I'm looking at your resume," he said, "I'm seeing these credentials and doing the math that you're probably pushing 40 and want a rate of pay double what I can get some hungry 20-something to accept."
I appreciated his honesty, even if it was galling on a couple of different levels. It's better not to give them the added help with that age math by confirming it with your graduation year, and you won't find me with mine listed anywhere unless the software requires it!
But it's not just older people — younger people can be dismissed as unskilled because of their graduation year.
Though it may not qualify as discrimination under the law, what many people don't consider is that young people are routinely undermined by their graduation year, too. The young woman in the video that inspired Lee's take is a perfect example.
In her interview, she spoke of how she worked full-time all through college. So whereas her classmates graduated with no tangible experience under their belts, she graduated with three entire years already spent in her field in the working world. That's a very different level of experience — and one that probably would have been dismissed entirely as soon as the hiring manager saw she had only JUST graduated college.
As Lee put it in his video, "don't let companies use your age to justify the seniority of roles that you should get. Your experience should dictate that… If you can do the role, you should get the role."
Leaving your graduation year off forestalls all those ridiculous notions about whether someone is "seasoned" enough for the role or whatever. That's frequently irrelevant—skills are what matters.
And Lee says while you're deleting your graduation date, you should also move your education down to the bottom of your resume while you're at it. "Your experience speaks much louder than your education does," he said. So put it where it belongs — right there at the top!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.