Job hunting after 50

It’s essential to keep your morale up, even when you hear “overqualified” at every interview.

Phil Boland’s résumé is too good. He’s been a CEO, a vice president of operations, a company founder and an investor. He has a track record of taking a floundering business and making it flourish. He’s a proven professional with 35 years of experience. His résumé is so good, he can’t find a job.

“The higher level the professional, the longer it takes. And anyone who’s a previous business owner has the hardest time,” says Kathryn Valencia, coordinator for Marin Professionals, an arm of the state Employment Development Department that helps managerial-level pros get work. Most of the people who come to Valencia’s group are in their mid-40s and 50s. Most of them will be out of work for six months to a year. Some take even longer to find another job in their field at a salary comparable to their old one. And some never do.

Boland started his career at Carnation Foods in Seattle in 1970, back in the days when corporate loyalty was not an oxymoron. He was 22 years old and he expected to stay with the company for the rest of his working life. He rose through the corporate ranks to assistant general manager, but things changed after a buyout by Nestlé. “I could see that we all were becoming numbers,” says Boland. “I was one of the first to leave, and soon afterwards 80 others left, out of the 120 in my division. They just started closing things down.”

At the time, massive layoffs at Boeing Corporation threw Seattle into a deep economic slump. Boland couldn’t find another company to hire him, so he decided to buy one of his own. He contacted a business broker and bought a small concrete company, increased its annual sales five-fold and sold it at a tidy profit. After that, he worked for the business broker for a while, then moved to San Rafael and founded a company with a group of five others who had developed a new high-tech product. He ran that company for two years, then left because he didn’t feel the high-tech world was a good fit for him. “I’m more of a brick than a click,” he says.

Boland longs for the kind of security and stability he used to have at Carnation. But when he interviews for a position, he’s often told he’s overqualified. “And I’d say, well, you’ve got to start someplace. And I’m happy starting where this position is. But they’ve already made up their mind,” he says.

An affable Irishman, Boland resembles actor Carroll O’Connor back when he played Archie Bunker. His hair is gray, he’s a little paunchy. He’s 57 years old. He knows his age is against him. “I’ve spoken with many recruiters and, when you go over your extensive résumé, it doesn’t take too long for them to figure out how many years you’ve been in the workforce.” He’s been looking for almost a year, working at the job search every day, like a full-time job. He’s done about 30 informational interviews. He met with one company several times over a period of five months before learning that the company might be sold and all hiring is on hold. “I knew I did everything right—proposals, strategizing,” he says. “It’s very, very frustrating.”

It’s also demoralizing. “You feel stigmatized when you’re unemployed,” he says. “Your social life suffers a lot. A lot of my identity is what I’ve done in my work life, and not having that really affects your self-esteem. You’re shaken to the core.” So Boland stays busy. He serves on the boards of church and service groups and volunteers several hours each week at Marin Professionals.

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ALL MEMBERS OF Marin Professionals are required to put in at least four hours of volunteer time each week. Valencia is the only paid staff member for the program. The members take turns facilitating the Monday morning meetings and teach classes during a week-long job skills workshop that’s offered each month. The workshop is similar to the kind of training major corporations used to pay outplacement services for—except it’s free. And Valencia says that because it’s run by the job seekers themselves, it’s even better. “Peer support is the key,” she says. “They keep each other accountable: ‘You haven’t done such and such this week? That was in your plan!’ They’re not allowed to slide into the doldrums again. If your search isn’t working one way, the group will help you get it going in another area. They can try out new résumés, new cold-calling techniques. There’s continual support. And even though the equipment here probably isn’t as good as what they have at home, they come in here to use it to have that coming-into-the-office feeling. It keeps their morale up.”

Dressing the part is another way the members keep up morale. At a recent Monday morning meeting, there isn’t a pair of jeans or a T-shirt in the room. About 30 men and women in business attire gather around a conference table in an office building in north San Rafael. Boland is co-facilitating the meeting with a woman we’ll call Sheila McMahon, a sales executive who’s been looking for work since last fall. The topic of the day is networking: how to engage your social and professional contacts in your job search.

Boland and McMahon kick off the meeting by having each member stand and deliver what the Marin Pros call the “elevator speech”—a pithy introductory spiel designed to knock ‘em dead within 60 seconds. And these people have it down. One by one, they stand up and reel off an astonishing series of professional accomplishments. They give the first impression of being sharp, personable and supremely capable. If these people are out of work, who’s running the business world?

Whoever they are, they’re mostly younger than the folks in this room. McMahon relates the experience of walking into a group interview and seeing at a glance that “my shoes are older than anyone there.” Most of the Marin Pros know the feeling. Most of them also believe that being over 50 puts them at a distinct disadvantage in the job market. The subject was discussed at another recent meeting facilitated by a group of now out-of-work human resources managers. “The HR people who conducted a forum for us all agreed that there is age discrimination out there,” says Valencia. “It’s active discrimination and you better be prepared for it.”

Employers know better than to ask your age in an interview—that’s just asking to get sued. But many of them will request a date of birth on an employment application, even though that’s not legal, either. You’re better off leaving it blank.

Marty Nemko, the career counselor whose column ran in the San Francisco Chronicle for the last six years, says there are lots of reasons why employers find younger workers more desirable. “There really is a youth culture,” he says. “There is a belief that younger people are hipper, more technology-focused, they have more energy. Somebody 22 doesn’t have kids, they don’t have a family, they’ll work 12, 13 hours. They don’t say, ‘Oh, I’ve got to be home for my child’s soccer game.’ Or, ‘My back is bothering me,’ or, ‘I’ve got to go in for prostate surgery.’ Not only that, young people are cheaper. An older person says, ‘I’m not going to work for $40,000 a year.’ A 23-year-old getting $40,000 says, ‘Cool!’ ”

Nemko, whose counseling clients are mostly over 40, says it’s important for older workers to come to terms with any lingering feelings of resentment over getting laid off. “Often, there is huge anger and a sense of entitlement: ‘I’m 54 years old, I did a great job and now I’m on my ass—those sons of bitches!’ You’ve got to take that chip off your shoulder or it’s going to come through big time when you interview.” Nemko knows what he’s talking about. He was recently notified by e-mail that his column would no longer run in the Chronicle.

THE MASSIVE LAYOFFS of the dot-com bust may have ended, but companies continue to downsize, outsource, reorganize or shut down completely. The Bay Area lost 400,000 jobs between 2001 and 2004 and the bleeding hasn’t stopped. Valencia says she’s seeing human resources managers who’ve quit their jobs because they couldn’t stomach having to lay off so many workers. “They may have to come in on a company buyout and literally downsize half the staff. And some people just can’t deal with doing that anymore.”

Often, it’s the managerial-level—read “older”—heads that roll, since companies can save more money by eliminating the higher-paid positions. Not only does that put more older talent on the street, it also makes it tough to put together a reference list—your old colleagues and contacts are looking for work, too. “I can’t even call the people I used to work for for references because they’re not there anymore,” says McMahon. And she can no longer rely on her usual job-search strategy—networking.

For years, McMahon was a whiz at networking. When she moved to San Francisco from New York 16 years ago, she organized a branch of local alumni from her old alma mater just so she could have a group of contacts to help her get established professionally. At the time, she was doing organizational consulting, and she landed her first few jobs through her new alumni network. After that, she could always depend on the business contacts she developed. Until now. Since sales dried up at her latest employer, she’s had to look for work on Craigslist, along with everybody else. “I’m out there now competing with a lot of people on the street,” she says. “A company will get 500, 800 responses to a listing. I don’t care what the papers say about unemployment numbers shrinking. It’s hogwash.”

I met with McMahon the day she and Boland had facilitated the Marin Professionals meeting. She’s an attractive blond, 57. She still retains a trace of her New York accent. She asked that her real name not be used for fear that her job search might be jeopardized. “I have my third interview with a company tomorrow for a sales position in financial services,” she tells me. “As far as they know, I’m presently employed. They don’t know that I go to EDD and I do all these things with Marin Professionals. But doing all these little things have kept my ego and my self-esteem afloat while I’m going through this.”

Because McMahon went back to school in her 30s and graduated in 1984, potential employers look at her résumé and assume she’s about 15 years younger than she is. That often gets her into the first round of candidates. At least it can get her past the computer screening process.

“For the larger companies, the days are over when an HR person would get in maybe a dozen or so résumés a day and open the envelopes and kind of skim through them,” says Steve Thomas, an IT manager who recently joined Marin Professionals. “Now you either fill out their online application or you cut and paste your résumé into an e-mail. And they have these parsing systems.”

The computer is programmed to check certain fields to screen out inappropriate candidates. And often age is one of the things it will check. Leave the field blank and you’ll give the computer one less reason to boot you out.

Thomas has another tip: The parsing system can also be set up to look for key words that identify particular skill sets. “Suppose you’re applying to be an executive assistant,” says Thomas. “If you say, for example, that you’re good in Microsoft Office Suite—that implies that you have Microsoft Word, Excel, Power Point and Access. But if the system is set up to look for Word, Excel and Access, your résumé will get dumped because it doesn’t include those key words.”

Thomas also suggests that you can use the parsing system to your advantage by naming skills you don’t have, to improve the odds that the computer will select you. “Say they were looking for somebody who has Visio, a program that’s used for documenting data flows,” says Thomas. “Maybe you don’t have that, but if you want to get your foot in the door, you might put at the bottom of your résumé, ‘I do not have skills in Visio.’”

Thomas says he’s used that ploy on his own applications—listing technologies he doesn’t have experience with, on the off-chance the parsing system is programmed to look for them. His objective is to get his résumé in front of a human being who, unlike a computer, can appreciate what he has to offer. “It’s been my experience that, if you can get in for an interview—you’ve already gotten past the parsing system, and usually they’ll do a phone interview—so by the time you get a face-to-face interview, you’ve got about a 90 percent chance of getting the job.”

WHAT SETS THOMAS apart from the crowd is that he’s a high-tech guy with great people skills—a relatively rare combination. “One of the problems in technology is that people get so focused on a very narrow skill set,” he says. “So they bring this guy in with no social skills, he barely has personal hygiene skills, but he is an animal when it comes to network technologies. And what companies need nowadays is people with broader experiences. You don’t want to tick off the client, you want to be able to talk, you don’t want to be shy and introverted.” He’s hoping to find a position as a sales engineer, providing technical support to the sales team, with plenty of customer interaction.

Thomas has managed to work fairly steadily since the dot-com crash, but none of his jobs has lasted as long as he would like. “These companies pop up and hire me and then a couple years later they go out of business or they get purchased by somebody else and there’s a massive layoff. So my average length of stay has been about two years. And most of the companies that I used to work for no longer exist.”

It’s a common experience these days, says Valencia. “People are having a very difficult time getting back into a position that is going to be ‘permanent,’ as in four or five years. They’ll get in on a consulting or short-term basis, so they’re in for a year or two and then they’re back out again. They’re not on anybody’s payroll and they’re getting no benefits. Easily one-quarter of my clients go into consulting and contract work.”

Valencia estimates that another 25 percent of her clients wind up taking a pay cut to find steady work, “either because that’s the only work they could find, or because they want to go into a more satisfying field and they’re willing to start at an entry level. For example, someone might be willing to work for a nonprofit at half the salary they used to make in the for-profit world.”

For those people determined to get back to their old line of work in a similar position, sometimes it can take a year, or even two, says Valencia.

“I see people living on their credit cards and selling off their last assets trying to hang on by their fingernails. Some people have had to take out their retirement. Some have had to pull their kids out of the college they were going to.”

Three weeks after my initial interviews with Thomas, McMahon and Boland, I checked in with them again. McMahon had good news. The company that had called her back for three interviews had made her an offer. By the time we go to press, she will have started her new job. Thomas had taken a position screening technology applicants for a recruiting company. His salary was a bit lower than what he used to make as a technologist, but he was enjoying the work. Then, two weeks into the job, the company lost several contracts and had to cut positions. Thomas is back in the job market again.

Boland just got turned down for a job he’d hoped would work out. He was told he had “too much entrepreneurial spirit” for the company’s corporate structure. So, while he’s waiting for something permanent to come along, he’s decided to register with a temp agency. “I really want to work,” he says. “I’m made to work. When I had my own business, I was doing 80-90 hours a week.” Frustrating as his search is, he’s still confident that it’s just a matter of time before the right employer recognizes his worth. “I bring to the table some fantastic, proven abilities,” he says. “I am what I am, and I know what I can do.”

To learn more about Marin Professionals, log on to http://home.pacbell.net/marinpro, or call Kathryn Valencia at 415/507-2121. Contact Marty Nemko through his Web site, www.martynemko.com.