Resume Tips / Excluding Employment Dates?
By Stowe Blankenship Recruiter
I recently had a fantastic candidate send me her resume. This candidate had a wealth of valuable experience in Healthcare IT, and her resume organized and presented well. One obvious curiosity, however, was that she had removed all of the employment dates from her career history. What’s more, I knew from an earlier resume that she had a stable work history (she had 10 and 5 year tenures with her two most recent employers) which is definitely something that our clients like to see. When I asked why she hadn’t included employment dates, she shared that she had worked with a professional resume writer and had been advised to remove all of the dates to reduce the potential of age discrimination.
Realistically, we all know that discrimination exists in many forms including age. However, the Healthcare IT industry and the clients I've spoken to have often shown appreciation and desire for seasoned industry professionals for many roles. Still, if you have many years under your belt and you want to be prudent about not making your age too obvious, there are a few simple things you can do. For instance, if you’ve been working for 35 years, it is definitely not necessary to list every job you’ve had since college. Going back 20 years is plenty. After all, we’re in the IT sector where anything that happened over 20 years ago has long since been upgraded or replaced (hopefully!). You can always make a short remark at the end of your career history that prior or non-industry experience can be provided upon request.
It is certainly acceptable to leave the dates off your educational degrees and anything else that would make your age very obvious. However, you should be including employment dates. In fact, I can just about guarantee that the first response I would get from my clients for a resume with no employment dates would be a request for the dates and a curious inquiry as to why they were omitted in the first place. The main point of interest in employment dates is typically to help an employer ascertain level of experience as well as employment stability (i.e.; that you weren’t “job hopping”).
One more good point to make here is for contract consultants and those who have worked a mix of contract and full time jobs in recent years. Since contracts are often relatively short by nature, you might find yourself with numerous employers and projects to present on your resume. You will want to indicate which items in your career history were contracts so that an employer won’t have to wonder or ask why you stayed only a few months or changed jobs so often.
And yes, my fantastic candidate was more than willing to add some of her employment dates back to her resume. I’m hoping to have her engaged in her next career adventure very soon…with my help of course!
