Business Insider  recently coined a phrase: “resume Botox,” the growing practice of executives stripping years from their resumes to appear younger and, as the premise goes, more hireable.

The article followed Lilly, a 48-year-old marketing strategist who spent six months sending out over 500 applications and getting crickets. Lilly consulted a resume consultant who advised her to remove half of a 25-year career > the college graduation date, the early roles, and roughly 20 years of proof.

Apprehensively, Lilly did it, and guess what? Interviews invites rolled in.

Some would probably say, “Well, it worked.” And technically, sure, it did. Lilly landed a job. But the role was junior, the pay was low, and the resentment never went away. Moral of the story? The tactic worked, not the outcome.

“But isn’t age discrimination illegal?”, you cry.

Yes. Age Discrimination Acts protect workers 40 and older, but there’s a caveat. We’ll get to it.

The Acts cover blatant discrimination, but can also apply to hiring practices that surreptitiously screen out senior applicants with requirements for “recent graduates,” arbitrary limits on years of experience, and similar strategic criteria. Lawyers call this disparate impact.

But the difficulty, of course, is proving it. This is the caveat.

Glassdoor reported a 133% year-over-year increase in jobseekers crying ageism between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025. So the law and the problem are not operating in separate worlds. They exist side by side, but the law rarely offers useful protection at the moment someone needs a job.

What are executives supposed to do with that?

Some are taking legal action. Class actions against AI-powered recruiting platforms are moving through federal courts, with plaintiffs alleging systematic age discrimination. Most executives, though, are doing what Lilly did: shortening the story, dimming the credentials, and removing the board presentations, turnarounds, acquisitions, and high-stakes decisions that demonstrate their value.

They dwarf themselves to get through a door seemingly designed for the less hieghtened. Then, on the other side, they ruefully discover the job is a big step down.

Let’s linger there a moment. Because the market can compensate you only for the value it can see.

If you remove consequential years of experience from your resume to win the interview, the employer evaluates you as a less-experienced candidate. The salary, authority, and seniority (or lack thereof) follow accordingly. You may survive the screening process, but you have also supplied the employer with a dumbed-down profile of your actual value.

Lilly didn’t hide that experience hoping to land a lesser role, she hid it to land any role. Consequently, Lilly received an offer aligned with the version she presented to the market, not with the value she was bringing.

No, the answer is not to cram every job since university back onto the resume. Nor is it to pretend 20 years of experience will be perceived as it was a decade ago. The stronger approach is not diminution. It’s translation.

There’s a considerable difference between hiding 20 years of experience and expressing those 20 years in language a fast-moving market can immediately understand.

Experience itself isn’t necessarily the problem. Experience that looks dated or difficult to interpret is. A hiring committee moving quickly tends to favour the candidate it can place at once: the one whose value looks specific, current, and obvious—the one whose story can travel without them in the room to explain it.

That isn’t merely a resume problem. It’s a positioning problem, and deleting the strongest parts of a career won’t solve it. Those parts need to be identified, framed, and presented so clearly that nobody can mistake seniority for irrelevance.

So, reducing the whole discussion to one useful question, it wouldn’t be, “What do I cut?”

It would be, “What does the market need to understand about my value, and how do I make it impossible to miss?”

The difference between those questions is the difference between Lilly’s outcome and the one that experience should have made possible.

Want to know where your resume is misunderstood, where the market is misreading your value or failing to see it at all? Talk with Terri Eevy to reframe your senior experience so it doesn’t get downgraded by the market.