When it comes to writing & updating resume, professionals struggle to decide how far back they should go in including their experience, what they should include & what they should give it a miss while writing their career history.
As an executive resume coach, I recommend including career details/history not beyond 10 years. The following paragraphs will throw light on why you should adopt this strategy & what are the situations where you can go beyond 10 years in writing about your experience:
- When recruiters or hiring managers start learning about what you did 10 years back, they generally give emphasis on the dates associated with the work experience. So questions like this pops-up in their head “ How old is the candidate?”, “ How old his kids are?”, “ At this age would he be able to work in the pressure the job demands?”. Whether we agree or not, age discrimination does exist. Restricting your experience up to 10 years in your resume makes sure that you overcome this barrier to hiring, your relevant experience is the recent one & you have kept with the current workplace hiring trends.
- If your career/experience beyond 10 years is not relevant for the job you are applying, please consider removing it from your resume. While writing a resume for my clients, I focus on creating document in such a way that prospective employer of my client cannot judge at first glance if the candidate is 30 years or 45 years of age.
- In some situations where your experience beyond 10 years is relevant for the job you are applying , lends additional credibility or showcases skills which otherwise is difficult to portray, it makes sense to include that experience in your resume. Prefer including earlier experience if it enhances your story or narrative you want to tell. However, it is not required to include experience in detail. Job seekers can include story or one or two bullet point that portrays how they solved the pain point. The following situations may warrant including earlier interview in the resume:
- Job title with earlier experience demonstrates the fact that he/she has learned industry dynamics from ground & is well equipped to handle typical nuisances.
- If skills are transferable across industry/sector, it makes sense to include earlier experience since many times name of the company indicates about the industry.
So how can you include earlier experience ?
When it comes to earlier experience, you should focus on the following:
- Identify: Determine which roles can endorse the story which you are trying to tell
- Synopsis: Include in brief best & relevant achievement you made till date.
- Remove dates: Removing dates will help you overcome the age barrier as discussed earlier.
Although earlier experience without dates might not get accurately cleared by Applicant Tracking System (ATS), it is easy to overcome this glitch by including the date, but change the text color to white – making them naked to the human eye on first glance and only unmasked when passing through ATS.
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