“Shear your CV”. Candidates learned to look 10 years younger (without lying)

In today’s difficult job market, strategically adjusting your CV with small “lies of omission” has become a rational survival strategy. And a simple trick allows candidates to look 10 years younger than they are — without making up their birth date.

When Lilya marketing strategist in Montreal, Canada, finished a long-term employment contract in the fall of 2024, immediately started looking for new work. I responded to several ads a day.

Six months and more than 500 applications later, there was nothing to show for their efforts, apart from some fruitless interviews and very silentthe marketeer told .

She then hired a recruitment consultant to advise her on how to write her CV and ensure that her applications were noticed. He expected the consultant to teach him formatting trickso or give you a crash course on keywords.

Instead, the specialist told him to delete everything except the last decade your CV and LinkedIn page, effectively eliminating more than half of his 25-year career, and omitting the degree completion date.

It wasn’t about simplifying their qualifications, the consultant explained; was effectively a way of “lie by omission“, with the strategic objective of look younger than your age.

Some friends in their 30s had already given her the same advice; one of them, more than a decade younger than Lily, had just landed a dream job in marketing after making “revisions” of this type in your application.

Although she felt torn about this strategy, Lily, who is now 48 and using a pseudonym to avoid professional retaliation — went ahead with the recommended edits. Interviews immediately began to appear. “It was as if, suddenly, the sun had come out and everything had become clear“, it says.

On TikTok, LinkedIn and wherever resume advice is offered, job seekers are being advised to hide their ages to be hired. And more and more workers, like Lily, are following the recommendation.

After the pandemic, theWorkers in their 30s and 40s were at their peak professional. Now, many of those same mid-career workers find themselves in a no man’s land of the job market: they are not “tidy” yet, but They are no longer “the future” of business and work.

Much of the current job market works on fear. Companies fear making costly mistakes that could put their business at risk, while recruitment managers worry that the wrong staffing choice could cost them their jobs.

For people who are in their years of highest income and are no longer able to find or keep a job reliably, the ethics and established expectations of the labor market begin to lose their relevance. When experience no longer matters, what does matter??

And in this reality, on the contrary, the “trim your resume” became a rational survival strategy.