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How to protect against ageism in interviews

By L. Vaas

You'd have to be a pretty ignorant hiring manager to ask an IT candidate how old he or she is. Why? Because it's illegal. But, according to mature IT workers, age discrimination is seldom that blatant.

"The recruiters at that level [of large corporations' human resources departments] know what to say," said Jim Holder, a program manager for Alternative Resources Corp. who is based in Chicago. "They've been through the school. They try the back-door method and ask things like, 'Do you have grandchildren yet?' Then they do the age calculations in their head."

Holder, who is in his late 50s, knows whereof he speaks. He's been working in corporate IT for more than 20 years. He started with punch cards and has since worked as a programmer, systems manager and manager of manufacturing systems for organizations such as American Hospital Supply, Libby McNeil and Libby, Wang Laboratories Inc., and the Army. Despite that extensive IT experience, he has had stretches when he couldn't find an IT position. The longest lasted two years, and the 2 percent response rate he got for the hundreds of résumés he sent out in that time taught him a few lessons about how to keep his résumé out of the recycle bin. That includes keeping your age to yourself.

But besides subtle ways of finding out an applicant's age, there are other ways that discrimination can creep into hiring practices, including the use of résumé-scanning software. Such applications screen out candidates with outdated skills or who list college graduation dates that aren't exactly recent.

That's why experts say that vintage IT workers who are in the market for a job should never volunteer information that could be used in a discriminatory fashion. "Older workers shouldn't put dates on their [résumés]," said Barb Gomolski, an analyst at Gartner Institute who is based in Fallbrook, Calif. "Don't put that you worked somewhere from 1987 to 1995. Just list the job experience."

Or take college graduation dates. If an ITer has 15 years or more of experience, all that should show up on a résumé are college names from which candidates received degrees, without listing date of graduation, Gomolski said.

Another trick that can help older candidates navigate the interview maze is knowing how to play the acronym game, so a résumé will clear the filters set in place by résumé scanning. "I don't think companies are intentionally using the software [to discriminate]," Gomolski said. "But, indirectly, they can. [Résumé-scanning software] can screen out, say, COBOL, or it can be programmed to say, 'Give me anything that's Java.'"

But it's an easy game to beat, she said. Anyone could put Java on a résumé if he or she has written a paper about the hot programming language, for example. That kind of trick may get you an interview, but not being able to actually program in Java certainly won't net you the job, she said.

Experts say that this type of software is often inadvertently set up to age-discriminate. "At a big company, when they get résumés, human beings don't read them," said Bill Payson, president of The Senior Staff Inc., a staffing company in Campbell, Calif., that places mature IT workers. "As far as possible, they clue the [software] to exclude candidates that don't fit a preconceived profile. The profile is probably written by somebody in their mid-20s. ... That's one of the problems tangential to the age problems—most large companies with HR departments have very young people as hiring managers."

But some organizations get it right. Take the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), in Washington, which uses SkillSet Software Inc.'s Desktop Recruiter. Desktop Recruiter blocks out chunks of data and stores it in a database under headings such as experience, education and address. When a job position opens up, a Fannie Mae recruiter can search the database based on whatever criteria pertain to the job opening.

The one thing the application is not used for, according to Cathy Mattax, director of CIS business management services at Fannie Mae, is to automatically deep-six résu més based on criteria that could potentially be used to weed out older ITers, such as too much education or too many years' experience. Instead, at Fannie Mae, human eyes scan every résumé, Mattax said.

And vintage IT pros who send in vital statistics to the organization may take some comfort in the knowledge that at Fannie Mae, those eyes are not likely to be all that fresh and dewy, since the median age of the company's work force is 40.

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