Getting Resumé Writing RightGetting Resumé Writing Right

Steve Janigian was laid off from his IT project manager job at a financial-services company in October 2002. During the first 15 months of being unemployed, he says he sent out 1,300 to 1,500 E-mail and print resumé--but received only about six calls and two face-to-face interviews.

Janigian, then 52, says he has decades of tech experience, including project-management expertise and 16 years of programming "anything you can think of."

It took about another year, but six weeks ago, Janigian finally landed a new job as an IT project specialist at a large global security-equipment company.

Janigian says he started having better luck landing job interviews once he started leaving out his years of programming experience, which he thinks gave hiring managers the first impression that perhaps his expertise was in older technologies.

Jeff Best, a 30-year IT veteran who'll turn 58 in August, says that after he accepted a management buyout from Nynex in 1996 and began looking for a new full-time position, he, too, had difficulty getting responses to his resumé until he also began withholding decade-old experience, which he says tipped off prospective employers about how long he's been in the tech industry.

"If you have a full resumé, you'll be excluded," he says. "Leave out anything that's more than 10 years old." Best suspects that online job sites and other job-recruiting software tools chuck out resumés that contain terms that indicate a candidate has worked with older technologies.

Best says he thinks it's also a good idea for older IT workers to exclude details about salary history, because evidence of moving up the pay ladder over the years can immediately make a perspective employer presume the older person would be too expensive to hire, he says.

However, others think that honesty is ultimately the best policy. John Challenger, CEO of executive recruitment firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, says leaving information out of a resumé is a bad idea because the deception snowballs. Once you leave out some job experience, but keep in educational info--like the year you graduated--that's a signal to hiring managers that you're not being totally truthful. And then if you start holding back on all dates--like graduations--that makes the resumé look even more suspicious.

Candidates need to play up how the sum of their experiences and contributions benefited prior employers, says Challenger. "Older candidates should be proud of their achievements," he says.

Perhaps Challenger is right. Ironically, Janigian says he ended up losing one promising job because he excluded his programming experience on the resumé. The hiring manager told him his experience looked great, but since his resumé didn't indicate that he had software experience, the company decided to fill the position with someone else.

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