As a lawyer advising anyone that they should lie about anything is never going to be an attractive proposition. It’s just not something that is open to me as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court whose office is built around honesty and respect for the profession of solicitor.
Can I understand why older people do lie on their CV to mask their age? Absolutely I can.
As the youngest person in the didlaw team this is not something I will have to worry about for the longest time but we do see with our clients the difficulties of finding a new job if our client is over the age of 50. Britain is an ageist society. It just is.
I should add that I do routinely get asked by clients if I know what I am doing because I am young. I find this insulting because again as a lawyer I would never wing it, but that’s just the way it is. You can’t win. Too old, too young…
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice of “age-washing” CVs is quite prevalent. This may be due to the use of AI as a recruitment tool. It is also reported that older candidates are even using Botox and plastic surgery to beat discrimination in the job market. In a society where people are working longer into old age this seems a contradiction but it apparently really is a thing.
A recent article in The Times suggests that one chap, when made redundant at the age of 46 from his job as a head of sales and marketing, did not expect that he would have to scrub the first decade of experience off his CV to stand a chance of getting another job. When he applied for more than one hundred jobs over a four-month period with his full CV, he received nothing but rejections. On advice from recruiters, he removed the dates from his university education and deleted the first ten years of his work experience. Interview requests started coming in!
Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that unemployment for those aged 50 to 64 has risen from 2.8 per cent to 3.3 per cent in the last five years. 66% of over-55s in the UK work in comparison to 81% in Iceland and 78% in Sweden. Something is wrong here.
Recruiters report that people over the age of 45 take three times longer to get a new job than their younger counterparts. If 55 is over the hill what about all those who wish to work until state pension age?
So, if you age-scrub your CV and your new employer discovers that you have misled them what happens then? I would feel extremely uncomfortable starting a new job on the basis of an untruth not least because there is always going to be a risk you are found out. An employer might reasonably be able to say that you have fundamentally breach the implied term of trust and confidence which underlies every employment relationship because you have misled them. It’s a difficult conundrum. Workers over 50 may have little success in finding work unless they age-scrub but then they have the stress of being found out. Honestly has to be the best policy. Surely there is more here to be done by our society at large to improve this position. Better protections against dismissal based on age perhaps? I don’t have the answers but I can appreciate that age discrimination is a legitimate concern and that it is happening out there.
This blog was written by Beatrice Young, Solicitor at didlaw.
