Over 50? The 7 Resume Mistakes That Get You Instantly Rejected (And What YOU Can Do)

In the 80s, job hunting meant scanning the Sunday paper, typing up a resume, and mailing it off in a crisp envelope. Today, we upload our resumes into an invisible digital void and often hear absolutely nothing back.

The reason for that silence? The Applicant Tracking System (ATS).

In this episode, we break down how employers train their ATS to act as an invisible bouncer, quietly looking for "generational habits" to filter out older candidates. Did you know that the decades-old habit of leaving two spaces after a period can cause the AI to assume your age and immediately reject your application?

We also dive into the frustrating reality of LinkedIn "ghost postings"—fake jobs that exist purely to collect data on salary expectations, not to actually hire anyone. Mass-applying is no longer the answer and might actually be extending your unemployment.

Tune in to learn how to fight back. We cover how to start using AI to your advantage, why simple formatting wins the day, and why real human conversations are the ultimate way to bypass the robots.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:12

Begins with your old fifty. You find your one in strong money. Brand new story.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

This is your trip on the power.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Well, welcome to another Empower Over Fifty Podcast. And today we're looking at resumes. Oh boy. So gone are the days, the good old days, in fact. Back in the 80s when you were looking for a job and you'd scour the uh Sunday papers, looking, circling jobs that were of interest to you. Do you remember those days? To be honest with you, I'm a little kind of young to remember those days myself. I didn't start properly looking for jobs until probably the late 80s. But anyway, um even then we would go for the papers, circle the uh jobs that we were interested in, polish up our resume, stick it in an envelope, mail it to the company, and then hopefully you would hear back, wear my best suit, go for an interview, and then it was up to you in that interview to do your thing. And then hopefully, if you got lucky, you got a job. Now, of course, fast forward a few years, the internet came along and things changed again. We went from the uh mailing the letters to actually emailing a resume because we were looking at monster.com and there were probably a few others, but monster.com I think was one of the larger uh job sites that you could go on to, and you'd uh you know look through and then you know you'd email your resume off to them. Then eventually it turned into applying online, and then of course LinkedIn came along, so suddenly, you know, your history, your work history, everything about you work-related, was out in the world to see. Now, during that time of the whole internet craze when sites like monster.com came along, companies, businesses started to get inundated with applications. So they needed to have some kind of a system where that they could actually uh basically weed out maybe the weaker candidates. But of course, that's all kind of like not really weaker. If you weren't very good at doing a resume, then you could be weeded out, right? So they had these things called ATS, an applicant tracking system. Does sound good, doesn't it? Until you're on the receiving end of it. But back in the 90s and probably the early 2000s, those ATS work systems were quite straightforward in the sense that they would look for keywords, and if your keywords matched the position that was being advertised, then you moved on to the next level. You probably got to somebody who could actually review your resume. But sadly, those days are gone too. The modern day ATS is a beast unto itself, it's powered completely by AI and is used in I believe like 90 or 95% of Fortune 500 companies today. Now, the clever thing about these ATS is that they're not one size fits all. Quite often the companies like Workday, for example, their big company, and I think they're being sued recently actually, would adapt their ATS system for you. So if you're uh a large company or even a medium-sized company and you were using Workday, they could actually tailor make the ATS system for your requirements. So let's just say, and I'm not suggesting anything here, but let's just say, for example, if you were wanting to hire someone for a particular role, but you didn't want them of a certain age. Let's just say that. The AI can actually be trained to look for markers so that it will weed out those people of a certain age, be it younger or older. I guess it can go both ways. But how it goes about doing it is really kind of incredible to be honest with you, because what it does, it looks for like markers in your resume, and it will look for like subtle things, you know. I mean, most people nowadays I think are pretty well caught on to the fact that you don't put your year of graduation, but they'll look for certain things, subtle things like for example, and I've used this multiple times before, but it's a great example, double space after a period. Now, I remember at school back in England, that's what I was taught, and I've heard other versions of it that it was a typing skill that people were taught when they were taught how to type back in the day. But we were all I was always taught about um leaving a double space. That's back in the 80s, I guess. And that is something AI is smart enough to pick up on. So if it sees a double space, you can probably go, okay, this is somebody probably who's older. But the thing is, it's not just that, there's a whole bunch of different things that the AI can pick upon. And it's things, for example, like terminology like proficient in Word or proficient in Microsoft Office. That immediately dates you back to the mid-2000s, that kind of area. Because that's the kind of language that I remember using back in the day. Now, employers pretty much assume that everybody can use Office. Certainly, pretty much everybody can use Word and Excel. Now, Excel is a little bit more difficult, perhaps, there are different degrees of knowledge, but we kind of know our way around it. So things like that really basically kind of stand out to an AI, and if you put that along with double spaces after a period, it starts to begin to put a picture together. Um, other terminology is um they're responsible for uh managing twelve people. That'll be an example. But in today's terminology, it could be something more like leading a group of twelve on a project, whatever. The key word being a leading instead of responsible. Different verb, different kind of connotation, but it's modern language. So AI really does look for these little markers. The other thing, also, if you're doing a resume, I seem to recall it uh again in days gone by, people would put a lot of polish into their resume, you know, fancy headers, um, maybe some columns to make things stand out. Because, of course, in the old day, you wanted your resume to stand out. You wanted someone who was going through a pile of resumes, go, oh, this looks different. You wanted it to stand out. Not anymore. No, no, no, no. Now it's got to be kept simple and plain. One big column, no separate columns, don't use headers and footers in a document. Quite often the ATS system can't pick up on those, and if it's kind of all over your place with different columns and tables, the ATS system could struggle with that. So clean and simple, plain. Now, of course, the other thing is if you're saving your your resume as a dot doc, that's another telltale sign because dot doc was actually um wasn't replaced, you can still save it as a dot doc, but it was replaced kind of with doc X. And that is the modern format that saving a Word document is put into. So if you're still saving your document as a dot doc, that is another little signal. You put that along with the double spacing, the terminology that you use, you know, you kind of get the the AI kind of gets a picture of of you without you even saying anything. So you you kind of get the picture as to how the ATS works, and there's more, and you can actually catch my uh latest video that came out um on Thursday, which actually goes over this a bit more. Uh youtube.com forward slash empower over fifty. But there are things you can do to try and beat AI, and that is when you're applying for a job, take the application, run it through AI, have AI pick out the keywords that are in the application, in the actual job posting, I should say. Have AI pick out the keywords, and then use those same keywords in your resume. And of course, it goes without saying, you should never be sending a generic resume to anybody. You want to make sure that you personalize each resume for each application you're making. But you want to take those keywords, put them into your resume, and then even go as far as to run your resume through AI for it to do a comparison with the actual job posting. Maybe there's something you're missing, maybe there's something that can be tweaked to be to be made even better. AI can pick on that and tell AI when you're doing it that you know you want a resume that's not ATS proof, but that can stand up to ATS and have AI do that work for you. I'm not saying have AI create your resume, that's up to you. But you want AI to refine it, to get it ready. And also, if you're producing a cover letter, have AI do that as well. Again, you create the cover letter, but have AI help you because it will know the keywords and it'll point you in the right direction to help you. Now, the best way to find a job is to actually network. Find people you know either through LinkedIn or people you've worked with in the past, family members. That's the best way to get a job. Because approximately 80% of people that find work find it through a network, through somebody they know. But if you are applying for a job through LinkedIn, you do need to be aware of something that happens quite often, and they call it ghost postings. And what that is, is that when companies advertise position, sometimes they advertise it for a number of different reasons. One is because they it's fair to advertise it openly, but really really their intention is to actually hire internally, and that happens a lot. Um, so that's one thing. So you could see a post, you apply for it, and you hear nothing back because they've already filled the position internally. And another sneaky trick is it has been known for businesses, companies to actually advertise positions online for data controlling. I'm not sure if that's a thing. Data scraping, in other words, to get information. They want to know what peop what pay people are looking at for position for position. Um they also sometimes want to just keep resumes on file without any real intention of hiring. So ghosting is a real thing, which actually drives me mad. Because again, back in the day, when we were young, or younger at least, um, I always seem to remember, you know, you could have applied for a position and you always heard back, absolutely always. You know, even if it was just a thank you but no thank you reply, you always got something back. But nowadays it seems almost acceptable that uh you hear nothing. Um which to me just sounds downright rude, to be honest with you. And quite often the other reason why you may not hear something is when there's ATS involved, you know, you don't you your resume doesn't even get to a person. So, you know, maybe the ATS system isn't set up to send you a reply, and some are. In fact, I heard literally just a day or two ago, somebody that applied to a for a job uh online, I think it was through LinkedIn, and they applied for it, and it was literally like three minutes later or five minutes later, they got a response back. No, thank you, the position's filled. Five minutes later. Wow. So there's all kinds of stuff going on online. You really want to get yourself prepared and get yourself set up if you're applying for work to get your your resume as as much ATS proof as possible. And at this point, I just want to mention if you go to the mpowerover50.com website, you'll find a free tools um page on the website which offers 22 free PDF guides covering job loss, retirement, your finances, what you should do if you lose your job. Completely free. Just go to mpowerover50.com and click on the free tools tab. Also, in there, you will find a self-assessment tool that you can take that will help you navigate should you be in this kind of crises area of losing a job. As a community, we are trying to build a community to help and support each other. So there's also a message board on the website. We just started it a week or so ago, so it's kind of thin on the ground, but don't let that stop you. If you have any concerns, questions, anything you want to share, you can go on to the uh message board, leave a message, and I will certainly reply to you there personally. And hopefully, as time goes on, we'll get more and more active members. So, again, please check out mpowerover50, that's 50.com, and and join the community because we are here to help and support each other. And that's all I've got for you this week, guys. I hope you have a wonderful weekend coming up. And don't forget, we are here for you at Empower Over 50, and we really again encourage you to just join up with the community, get involved, get into the conversation. My eventual aim is actually to try and build a website where that not only can we help each other through a message board, but maybe in some way we can actually maybe even try and help each other with work itself. But that's down the road. Anyway, guys, thank you for listening, and I hope you have a great weekend and the rest of the week. Until the next time, bye bye.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Feel the rhythm, feel the power. This is your triumphal now.