Ageism

Nobody says your age. They say not current.

Age almost never gets said out loud in a hiring debrief. What gets said is that you seem not current, and a personal brand is just a short trail of dated, public evidence that makes that sentence impossible to say about you.

Listen to this one

Full episode transcript

Pip: The job posted at twenty past nine on a Tuesday morning. You applied twenty minutes later, matching every line of the requirements. The rejection came back two days later with nothing in it. Nobody said a word about your age, and this is Angela Malagon’s point, because in a company with a functioning legal department, nobody ever will.

Mara: So this episode is about the sentence that gets said instead. The post is called Nobody says your age, they say not current, and it is about what a personal brand is actually for when you are the oldest candidate on the shortlist. Take us into the room first.

Pip: Four people, twenty minutes, and one of them has to describe you to the rest before the next meeting starts. The post makes the point that an objection in that room has to be short, defensible, and sayable in front of HR. Age is none of those things.

Mara: So it arrives in translation. I am not sure they are current. Feels more strategic than hands on. Might be set in their ways. The post lists those out, and what strikes me is that every one of them is disputable in theory and undisputable in practice, because the candidate is not there.

Pip: And Angela was in those rooms. Fifteen plus years recruiting talent for companies such as Cisco, Google, and Wells Fargo, sitting in the debrief as the advisor whose read shaped where the conversation landed.

Mara: Which is where the useful part comes from. She says defending a candidate never moved that objection. Evidence did. Somebody pulls up a name, there is a post from March about the exact problem the team is arguing over, and the objection has nothing left to hang on.

Pip: That is the line I would keep. Not current is not a verdict on your skills. It is a report on how little recent material there was to look at.

Mara: And the room fills that vacuum with whatever is cheapest to say. The post is honest about how unfair that is. Somebody with fewer years and more posts gets the benefit of the doubt you have to go out and earn back in public.

Pip: But cheap to fix, which is the part I did not expect. There is no content calendar in this post. No video, no personal website, no follower target.

Mara: Forty minutes a week is the number. There is a list of eight things, and a few of them surprised me. Pick the argument, not the topic, is the first one. A topic makes you a broadcaster. An argument makes you a participant.

Pip: Comment before you post is the other one. Three substantive comments a week, under people who actually hire in the field, and the comment has to be worth more than the post it is sitting under.

Mara: And say what you changed your mind about. That is the one I would put at the top. One post about a position you held for years and then abandoned, and why. The post argues nobody rigid ever writes that post, so writing it settles the question.

Pip: There is also a before and after on a single comment, using a made up candidate, and the difference is almost embarrassing. The first version agrees and mentions twenty eight years. The second version names what is different about this cycle and what broke.

Mara: Same person, same experience, different sentence gets written about them. And the throughline is worth saying plainly. Nothing in this post asks you to hide anything, delete a decade, or pretend to be somebody else. It is all addition.

Pip: Here is the line she wants you to screenshot. This is not a midlife crisis, it is a hiring market crisis, and there is a big difference. Next time, the other half of this problem, what a recruiter finds in the first ninety seconds of searching your name, and how much of it you actually put there.

Angela Malagon — Career Strategist. 15+ years recruiting talent for companies such as Cisco, Google, and Wells Fargo, then job searched against the same systems.

The job posted at 9:20 on a Tuesday morning. You applied at 9:40, with twenty-eight years in the field, every requirement matched, and a referral from someone who used to report to you. The rejection landed Thursday afternoon with no reason in it. Nobody mentioned your age, because in a company with a functioning legal department, nobody ever does.

Here is the short answer on a personal brand for older job seekers: it is not a logo, a newsletter, or a follower count. It is a short, dated, public trail showing you are working on the problems your industry is arguing about this year. That trail exists so the person summarizing you in a twenty minute meeting has something recent to point at, instead of reaching for the word seasoned.

You cannot argue a hiring team out of an impression nobody will say out loud. Age discrimination is real and it is illegal, and it is also close to impossible to prove from outside a hiring process, which is why this post is tactical and not legal. What you can change is what comes back when somebody types your name into a search bar, and you can start changing it today, for free, in about forty minutes.

What not current actually means in a debrief

Debriefs move fast. Four people, twenty minutes, and one of them has to summarize you to the rest before the next meeting starts. An objection in that room has to be short, defensible, and sayable in front of a note taker. Age is none of the three, so it never gets said.

It arrives translated instead. I’m not sure they’re current. Feels more strategic than hands on. Might be set in their ways. We need someone hungry. Each one is disputable in theory and undisputable in practice, because you are not there to dispute it. It is the same objection that never names itself.

I spent 15+ years recruiting talent for companies such as Cisco, Google, and Wells Fargo, and I sat in those debriefs as the advisor whose read shaped where the conversation landed. Nothing I said ever moved that objection. Evidence moved it. Somebody would pull the candidate up on a second monitor, there would be a post from March about the exact migration the team had been arguing about all quarter, and the concern would just stop, because there was nothing left to hang it on.

Not current is not a verdict on your skills. It is a report on how little recent material there was to look at. The room fills that vacuum with whatever is cheapest to say, and the cheapest thing available is your career span with a different word on it. That is what actually happens in the debrief.

Why a quiet profile costs you the benefit of the doubt

The cheap justification is that a hiring team should be judging your work, not your posting habits. They should. They do not have your work. They have a resume, a profile, and roughly ninety seconds of searching between two meetings.

Two candidates, both composites, both with the same twenty plus years. The first has a profile last touched in 2023, a headline lifted straight off the org chart, and nothing public since. The second has the same resume, plus four comments and one short article from the last six months, all of them on the problem the team is currently losing sleep over. The second candidate is not better at the job. The second candidate is easier to argue for, and in a twenty minute meeting, easier to argue for wins.

That is unfair and I am not going to soften it. Somebody with half your experience and twice your posting volume will keep receiving the benefit of the doubt you now have to earn back in public. The evidence is the part you control, and the evidence is cheap to make.

How to build a personal brand that reads as current

No content calendar, no personal website, no video, no follower target. Forty minutes a week, spent where the people who hire in your field can see it.

Pick the argument, not the topic. Every field has two or three live disagreements running this year. Pick one and stand somewhere in it. A topic makes you a broadcaster, an argument makes you a participant.
Comment before you post. Three substantive comments a week, under people who actually hire in your field. Comments cost less to write and land in front of exactly the people whose opinion of you matters.
Make the comment worth more than the post. Add the thing the original left out, from something you personally ran, with a number or a constraint attached. Agreement with nothing underneath it reads as filler.
Date yourself forward. Name this year’s tooling, this year’s regulation, this year’s vendor shift, specifically. Advice that would have been true in any of the last ten years is exactly what gets read as not current.
Say what you changed your mind about. One post about a position you held for years and then abandoned, and what changed it. Nobody rigid writes that post, which is why writing it settles the question faster than any list of skills.
Write one real article a month, not one a week. Eight hundred words on a problem you actually solved, with the constraints and what it cost. Volume is not the signal here, specificity is.
Stop leading with the span. “Twenty-eight years of experience” is a number your reader silently converts into an age before they reach the end of the sentence. Lead with the problem and the outcome, and let the depth show itself.
Move it into the field people search. A month of good comments does nothing if your headline still reads like a line from the org chart. Fix that field first, because it is the one a recruiter is actually searching against.

Before and after: one comment on somebody else’s post

This candidate is a composite. The pattern is not.

Before

Great post, could not agree more.
In my 28 years in supply chain I have watched this cycle come around several times.
The fundamentals never really change.

Solid advice for anyone starting out.

After

The part that is different this cycle is the integration lead time, not the demand signal.
We hit it on a 40 site rollout last year · forecast held, the vendor calendar did not.

If you are scoping one of these now, budget the integration window before the model. That is the order we got wrong.

Same person, same twenty-eight years, same afternoon. The first comment says you have seen a lot. The second says you are still in it.

The rooms that count besides LinkedIn

LinkedIn is where the search happens, but it is not the only place your name gets repeated. The other rooms are smaller, which makes them much easier to be known in.

Your industry association. The Slack, the forum, the member directory. Answer questions there under your own name. Those threads get read, and often indexed, by the people running searches.
One podcast in your niche. Not as a host. Send the host a specific correction or addition to a recent episode, and you are a known quantity to them inside a month.
Conference question and answer. Ask the sharp question from the floor with your name and company attached, then talk to the two people who turn around.
A local meetup you can drive to. Smaller room, longer memory, and the organizers are always short a speaker for next quarter.
Former team and alumni channels. The people who already know your work are the shortest path to your name being said out loud in a room before a job is posted.

The part I’d want you to screenshot

You cannot control what a stranger assumes when a long career lands on their screen. You cannot stop anyone converting your dates into a number in their head. What you can control is what sits next to those dates when somebody goes looking, and whether it has a recent timestamp on it.

The trail does a second job too. It keeps you findable by the people already inclined to say your name, which is where most of these jobs come from, because the hidden job market is just your old coworkers.

Three comments, one article a month, one room that is not LinkedIn. Nothing in that list asks you to hide a decade, drop your degree, or pretend to be somebody younger. It is all addition, and none of it costs anything.

This isn’t a midlife crisis. It’s a hiring market crisis. Big difference. The fix was never to look younger, it was to be visibly inside the argument, and twenty-eight years is the thing that qualifies you to be there.

If you want to know what your profile is actually saying

You’ve spent years navigating corporate bureaucracy. You can learn LinkedIn. I’ll show you.

That’s the Resume & LinkedIn Audit, $150. I read both of them the way a recruiter reads them, in the order they get read, and you get a written report naming what is dating you and what to change first. It is not a rewrite service and it is not a template.

Send the contact form and you’ll get a personal reply from me within 48 hours. Not a bot, not a template. If you’re not ready for that, the Job Search Library is free, [LIBRARY-ASSET].

Book the resume audit — $150 Get the free Job Search Library

Hiring truth, in your inbox

The stuff nobody puts in a rejection email. No spam, no pep talks. Subscribe here.