Age discrimination happens whether employers are willing to admit it or not. The good thing is that there are several ways to avoid age discrimination when submitting your resume to companies. Businesses go by what they call the rule of “20” to determine an applicant's age. They assume that an applicant was 20 years of age when they first entered the workforce. Then they look at the work history or the graduation date on the resume to calculate your real age. For example, If the work history goes back five years, they would add five to the assumed age of 20, this makes the applicant appear to be around 25 years of age. Another example is the use of graduation dates from the education section of your resume. If an applicant's resume indicates that they graduated from college in 2005, and it is now 2015, they add 10 to 20 and the assumed age of the applicant is now around 30 years old.
There are two ways to use the rule of "20" to your advantage. If you think the position you are applying for is looking for someone older, add more years to your work history. If you don't have any more years of work history to provide; improvise, by including volunteer work or any other experience that you weren't necessarily paid for, but gained experience. If you think the position you are applying for is looking for someone younger, leave off a few years of experience, or eliminate the graduation date.
The second thing that can give your age away is your email address. If you have an AOL or Hotmail email account, please replace it with a Gmail account. When employers see AOL they think dial-up....and when they think dial-up; they think ancient and when they think ancient... they think old!
Lastly, the third thing that can give your age away on a resume is your phone number. If your contact number is a landline....need I say more!