What would happen if you lied about your age (eliminate the first 10 years from your resume), both at the time of applying for the job and after joining the company? How much trouble can you get in for that? It doesn't seem unethical at all.
I basically did this. I mean I wouldn't say it's a "lie" to simply omit things from you're resume that you don't feel are relevant or may hurt your chances. I shortened my resume to a single page and left high school and my attempt at college off of it completely. No one ever brought this up at the interview.
It's also not actually legal where I live for the employer to inquire about an applicant's age. After I was hired, the manager did ask me at lunch how old I was, I just replied, "I can't remember". Yeah, he probably didn't mean anything by it and he could probably look it up with HR. But I just honestly didn't feel like it should be relevant to my role at work.
I don't feel like this was unethical, perhaps slightly paranoid at most. Speaking of which, I didn't even tell anyone I had kids until I was out of my 90 day probation period.
Every job that you have gotten has needed ID for background checks. I've never been asked for ID, age, or gender during the interview process. Nor would I give that information freely.
I recently filled an online application that asked for SSN and I dropped it right there. You only need my SSN for employer taxes, no way is that part of any job interview.
SSN also has an approximate timestamp encoded into it. The prefix can be linked to the time period it was given out, which is typically at or near birth registration.
This is public knowledge, and the prefixes are even used for identity verification at banks.
If you got your SSN at an age other than ~0, you may get flagged as a mis-match when e.g. applying for a new bank account, and it will require a human override to get past.
The one problem might be education on your resume. People can infer age from that generally. If you leave dates off it might also be seen that you are hiding the dates because of your age.
Have the work section chronological (And omit everything >10 years old), and the education section styled a bit differently, as a bunch of bullet points without dates.
It might be a bit weird, but I doubt it'll fail the HR filters. You can even do something like call it 'Education and Skills', in which case dates don't even make any sense to include. (Nobody ever says which year they've learned C#.)
I don't really have a strong opinion though. When I last switched jobs a number of years back a friend of mine strongly advocated for obfuscating age as much as possible. I don't even remember how much I did but it didn't really matter because I knew the person running things and a number of the other people involved in the process. So this wasn't really an HR filtering thing.
I don't work in HR, but I have a hard time imagining that any HR department has a bullet-point checklist they expect from resumes, that includes 'MUST SPECIFY EDUCATION DATES'. ('MUST SPECIFY EDUCATION' is certainly on there.) [1]
And unless these things are explicitly checked for, your resume won't look that weird.
[1] If they do, they should stop, because this sort of thing is great evidence for an age discrimination lawsuit, even if you don't engage in age discrimination.
I don’t specify education because I never even completed high school. I get significantly less recruiter spam vs friends with an education section on their linkedin.
Or do what I did, and drop out of college and go back to finish it several years later, and just put the year I graduated on there. My education makes me seem younger than I actually am for the people that judge by that.
