I’m not getting job interviews because I’m too old.

Sometimes it might be, but more often than not it isn’t.

Now, I’m not for a second going to pretend that ageism in hiring doesn’t exist, because it absolutely does. I’ve worked in recruitment for more than 20 years and I know it happens.

But I also think a lot of people who are struggling to find a job convince themselves that their age is the reason they’re being rejected, when there could be something completely different going on.

And there’s something else worth saying here. Most of the time, when a recruiter looks at your CV, they probably don’t even notice how old you are.

Think about how recruiters actually read CVs. They’re looking at your most recent experience, what you’ve done, whether you have the skills they need and whether it looks like you could do the job they’re recruiting for. They’re not sitting there trying to work out whether you’re 43, 51 or 58.

And even when your age is obvious, I genuinely believe very few recruiters actually care.

Recruiters have jobs to fill. That’s what they care about. If I’m recruiting for a sales role, I’m looking for someone who can sell. If I’m recruiting for a marketing role, I’m looking for someone who can market. If I’m recruiting for a leadership role, I’m looking for evidence that you can lead.

Your skills and experience are far more important to me than the year you were born.

Of course, there will be recruiters and hiring managers who have biases around age. I’m not naive enough to pretend otherwise. But before you decide that’s why you’re not getting interviews, it’s worth looking at what else a recruiter might be seeing.

Because I’ve had two examples of exactly this recently.

“It must be my age”

A few weeks ago, I got an email from somebody who had been applying for jobs and getting nowhere. He was firmly convinced it was because of his age.

So I asked him to send me his CV.

I opened it and one of the first things I noticed was that I couldn’t actually see anything that gave me any real indication of how old he was. There was no obvious reason for a recruiter skim-reading that CV to think, “This person is too old.”

But I did notice something else.

The impression I got from skim-reading his CV was “entrepreneur” rather than “employee”.

And that can bring a completely different set of biases with it. A recruiter or hiring manager might wonder whether he’s overqualified, whether he’ll be happy reporting to someone else, whether he’ll get bored or whether he’ll leave after six months because he decides he wants to go back to working for himself.

None of those things might be true. That’s important. But CVs aren’t just collections of facts. The way you present those facts creates an impression, and recruiters make decisions based on that impression.

He’d convinced himself that recruiters were seeing his age and rejecting him because of it. I looked at exactly the same CV and saw a completely different potential problem.

When I explained it to him, he agreed.

And then, almost perfectly, it happened again.

“I’ve applied for hundreds of sales roles”

I posted about that story on social media and somebody sent me a DM in response.

He told me he’d been working in sales for more than 20 years and said:

“I have applied for hundreds of sales roles without getting an interview and I believe it is primarily because of my age.”

So I asked to see his CV.

It didn’t take long to spot a problem.

His CV told me he worked in sales. It told me where he’d worked and what he’d sold. But it didn’t contain any sales figures, revenue numbers, targets or any real indication of his performance.

His CV told me he worked in sales. It didn’t tell me whether he was any good at it.

That’s a pretty big problem when you’re applying for sales jobs.

If you generated £2 million in revenue, tell me. If you consistently achieved 120% of your target, tell me. If you grew an underperforming territory, tell me how much you grew it by. If you were the highest-performing salesperson in your team, tell me.

Because imagine I’m recruiting for a sales role and I’ve got two CVs in front of me.

One tells me that the candidate has 20 years of sales experience and lists all of their responsibilities.

The other tells me that the candidate has consistently exceeded a £1 million annual target, won £500k of new business last year and finished in the top 10% of the sales team.

Which one gives me more reason to pick up the phone?

Again, this guy had decided the problem was his age.

Could age have played a part in some of those hundreds of applications? Absolutely. Neither he nor I could possibly know.

But I could see a very obvious problem with his CV that had nothing whatsoever to do with his age.

You might be solving the wrong problem

This is the bit I think really matters.

When you’ve applied for 50, 100 or even hundreds of jobs and keep getting rejected, of course you start trying to work out why.

Maybe you decide it’s your age. Maybe it’s because you don’t have a degree. Maybe you’ve been out of work too long. Maybe you’re overqualified. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that some AI-powered ATS is automatically rejecting you before a human ever sees your CV.

Sometimes the thing you’ve identified might genuinely be working against you.

But sometimes you’re solving the wrong problem.

The first person thought his age was the problem. I saw a CV positioning him as an entrepreneur when he wanted to be seen as an employee.

The second thought his age was the problem. I saw a salesperson with more than 20 years of experience whose CV gave me absolutely no evidence of how successful he’d been at selling.

And this is what makes reviewing your own CV so difficult.

You know what you meant when you wrote it. You know that you were brilliant at sales. You know that running your own business gave you incredibly valuable experience. You know the context behind every job, achievement and career decision you’ve made.

The recruiter doesn’t know any of that.

They only know what you put in front of them.

And most recruiters aren’t looking for reasons to reject a 50-year-old so they can hire a 30-year-old instead. They’re trying to fill the vacancy sitting on their desk.

Make it easy for them to see why that person should be you.

Because sometimes the thing stopping you getting interviews isn’t the thing you’ve convinced yourself it is.

Positioning and context are everything.

What would I see in your CV?

Both of the people in this article thought they knew why they weren’t getting interviews. Within a few minutes of looking at their CVs, I saw something completely different.

That’s exactly why I offer Personal CV Reviews.

I’ll personally review your CV exactly as I would if it landed in front of me as a recruiter, then record a private video walking you through what I see, the assumptions I’m making, what might be working against you and what I’d change.

I’ve spent more than 20 years reviewing CVs and hiring people, so this isn’t an automated score or generic list of CV tips. It’s me looking at your CV and giving you the same honest feedback I’d give if you were sitting in front of me.

If you’ve been applying for jobs and can’t work out why you’re not getting interviews, let me take a look.

Get your Personal CV Review