Leslie Sonnenklar has 32 years of experience in communications. She started as a marketing coordinator in 1994, ran her own business for 11 years, and most recently served as director of content and communications at a marketing agency. Since a layoff in early 2025, she has applied to more than 300 jobs. She has landed only a handful of interviews.
Her conclusion, told to Business Insider as part of their “Still in the Game” series on job hunting after 50: at a certain point, experience becomes a liability. Companies read her 32 years and see someone overqualified, expensive, and set in her ways. Recruiters told her to include only the last 10 years of her history.
If you’re job hunting in your 50s or 60s and hearing silence, her story probably sounds familiar. And the bias against older workers she describes is real; we won’t pretend otherwise. Field studies have documented it for years: in the largest of them, researchers sent out more than 40,000 otherwise identical resumes, and the ones that signaled an older candidate got fewer callbacks, with the sharpest penalty landing on older women ¹. We haven’t seen Leslie’s resume; shaping alone might not have changed her numbers.
But there’s a part of this that you control, and it’s bigger than most people think. Shaping won’t erase the gap those studies measure, but it shrinks the surface the bias has to grip. Because often, experience itself isn’t what gets screened out.
The unshaped resume is.
What “overqualified” actually means to the person reading your resume
When a hiring manager reacts to a very senior resume, they’re almost never reacting to the years themselves. They’re reacting to four quiet worries the resume failed to answer:
“They’ll be too expensive.” Thirty years of titles reads like a salary demand, even when you’d happily take the role at the posted range.
“They’re too senior for this role.” If the job is a hands-on individual contributor role and your resume leads with a decade of directing teams, the reader concludes you’ll be bored, frustrated, or gone in a year.
“They’re set in their ways.” A resume that dwells in past eras, past tools, and past org charts reads as someone who peaked elsewhere and wants to keep doing it the old way.
“They’re winding down.” The quiet one nobody says out loud: spent, tired, coasting toward the exit. It hides inside job-posting code like “high energy,” and it gets read onto any resume whose best material is a decade old.
Notice what all four have in common: they’re stories the reader invents to fill a gap your resume left open. An unshaped resume, the kind that simply lists everything you’ve ever done, invites all four stories at once. It hands the reader 32 years of undifferentiated material and makes them do the work of figuring out which parts matter for this role. Under time pressure, they won’t do that work. They’ll reach for the nearest stereotype instead. Psychologists have a name for this: stereotypes act as “energy-saving devices,” the shortcut a busy mind takes when it doesn’t have the resources to read carefully ². A screener with two hundred resumes in the queue is the textbook case.
The fix isn’t to hide your experience. It’s to shape it so the resume answers those four worries before they’re asked.
How to not look overqualified: answer “too expensive” with focus
A resume that includes everything signals “I am a big, senior, expensive hire.” A resume built for the specific role signals “I want this job.”
That means right-sizing your material to the scope of the role in front of you. If the job is a senior manager role, the resume should read like a strong senior manager, not like a compressed executive memoir. Lead with the work that matches this role’s altitude. Compress or cut the parts that sit far above it.
Leslie made a sharp observation in that same interview: many senior job postings describe a unicorn. One role that wants strategy, copywriting, SEO, analytics, and design at once. For a deeply experienced candidate, the unicorn posting is at least one place where your depth works for you: you’re far more likely to have real depth in several of them. The mistake is trying to prove all of them. Read the posting closely and figure out which two or three capabilities the team actually bleeds without: they’re the ones repeated throughout the posting, named in the title, or sitting in the first three requirements. The rest is wishlist. Build the resume around those (we walk through the mechanics in how to tailor your resume for each job). Depth on what they need beats coverage of everything you have.
It’s not lying, and it’s not settling. It’s the same thing you’d do in the interview: meet the conversation where it is. You wouldn’t answer a question about campaign execution with a speech about enterprise strategy. Your resume shouldn’t either.
One honest boundary: the resume can open the door, but the salary question itself gets settled in the screen, and that’s a different playbook. What focus buys you is a resume that doesn’t get killed on “too expensive” before anyone ever asks.
Answer “too senior” by matching the ask
The practical rule, and it matches what most recruiters and career guides converge on ³: full bullets for roughly your last 10 to 15 years, and a one-line “Earlier career” summary for everything before.
Here’s where the much-hated advice to “only include the last 10 years,” the exact advice recruiters gave Leslie, gets it half right. As it’s usually delivered, it’s a euphemism: trim the years so you look younger. That’s the wrong reason to do a right thing.
Trimming old roles has nothing to do with hiding your age and everything to do with attention. Every line on the page competes for it. A paragraph about a role from 1998 doesn’t just take up space, it dilutes the lines that could win you the interview. The reader has well under a minute, often seconds. Spend all of it on the strongest, most relevant material you have, which is almost always your recent work.
Your older experience doesn’t vanish. The “Earlier career” line establishes depth without demanding attention, and the strength of your recent bullets does the rest. What you should not do is print a years-count in your summary: a “30+ years” line at the top hands the screener the exact expensive-and-senior cue this whole approach exists to defuse. The depth is still there; it just stops competing for the reader’s minute.
One thing trimming and bullet-shaping can’t fix on their own: your title. Leslie’s resume will say “director of content and communications” no matter how the bullets are sized, and a director title on a senior-manager application is exactly what triggers the flight-risk read. Your summary has to answer it, and the answer that works is a forward-facing want, not a defense. Something like: “After a decade directing content teams, I want to be back closer to the craft, writing and shipping the work myself.” Then the bullets under that director title have to show hands-on execution, not just team leadership, because a summary claim alone doesn’t beat a title. The evidence below it does.
Answer “set in their ways” by leading with the newest thing you’ve learned
This is the highest-leverage move of the four, and the one most senior candidates bury.
Leslie taught younger colleagues how to use AI at her last agency. That fact demolishes the “set in her ways” story on contact. And on a 32-year resume, a fact like that tends to appear nowhere, or in a skills list at the bottom, below software that shipped in 2009.
Whatever your version of that fact is, it belongs at the top. The tools you adopted in the last two years. The process you changed. The thing you learned because the industry moved and you moved with it. One concrete, recent example of adaptation outweighs a paragraph of claims about being “adaptable,” because it’s evidence instead of adjective.
If you’ve been working since the nineties, your career is a record of adaptation: the internet, then mobile, then the cloud, now AI. You didn’t watch those shifts from a distance. You shipped through every one of them. Most senior resumes never say so. Yours should.
Answer “winding down” with evidence of appetite
The worry hiding under “high energy” is simple: is this person still building, or running out the clock?
Adjectives can’t answer that. “Energetic self-starter” is a claim, and the person screening you has read ten thousand of them. Dates can. The most convincing thing a resume says about your drive is a strong result with a recent date on it: something you shipped, fixed, or grew in the last year or two, written with the same care as the wins you’re proudest of from a decade ago.
Then say what you want next. Plenty of senior resumes account for the past in detail and go completely silent about the future. One line in the summary about the problem you want to work on next does more against the coasting read than any adjective, because people who are coasting don’t have a next.
Should you hide your age on your resume? What shaping is not
Let’s be clear about the line, because there’s a whole genre of advice that tells older candidates to scrub their age: chop everything older than 15 years wholesale, strip the dates off your jobs, chase a “younger looking” format.
That kind of cosmetic age-hiding is a losing game. Give a hiring manager job dates with gaps, or no job dates at all, and the page reads as edited-to-conceal, which lands worse than one that is simply confident. (Dropping a graduation year is different. Dates on jobs are expected; dates on degrees aren’t, and nobody reads an absent degree year as hiding something. Take that one freely.) We wrote about the better alternative in Stop Pointing Your Resume Backward: the goal is not to look younger but to point the resume forward, at the value you’ll deliver next, instead of backward at everything you’ve ever done.
Shaping isn’t concealing. Trimming a 1998 role because it isn’t relevant is shaping. Deleting job dates so nobody can tell how old you are is concealing, and it doesn’t work.
The honest version: all of it, shaped for the role
The bias Leslie describes is real, and shaping a resume won’t single-handedly defeat it. Some screeners will discount senior candidates no matter what the page says. That’s their failure, not yours.
But the four stories that get senior resumes screened out (too expensive, too senior, too rigid, winding down) are stories a shaped resume pre-empts and an unshaped one guarantees. You can’t control the reader’s bias. You can control whether your resume feeds it.
Thirty years of experience isn’t a liability; it’s the deepest well of material any candidate in the pile has. The job of the resume is to draw from that well precisely: the right depth for this role, the right two or three capabilities for this posting, and the newest proof that you’re still moving.
That’s not less than your full story. It’s your full story, told for the job you want next.
Want to see how your resume reads right now? Run it through our free resume score. It takes about a minute, and it’ll show you where the page is working against you, including the sections that are diluting your strongest material.