Daniel Patel, Recruitment Director at Eursap, shares his insights on the growing issue of age bias in recruitment and the steps experienced professionals are taking to avoid it.
One in five job seekers over 50 feels compelled to omit age-related information from their CVs, essentially removing graduation years, cutting decade-old roles, and quietly restructuring their career history to avoid being filtered out before they’re fairly considered. That’s according to a Totaljobs survey of 4,000 UK workers, which also found that a quarter of over-50s hesitate to apply for roles at all, simply because they expect to be dismissed.
There’s no gap being hidden here, no career low point being glossed over. The thing being concealed is experience itself, because too many candidates have found that depth of experience and age are read as the same liability.
Daniel explains that subtle bias in CV screening often goes unnoticed because it hides behind the process.
“Many employers believe their hiring decisions are purely objective, yet bias often creeps in through habit rather than intent. In a market where experienced professionals are extending their careers and offering decades of accumulated judgement, small assumptions about age can quietly narrow the talent pool. A graduation date, a long career history, or experience that predates current trends should signal depth, not obsolescence. When organisations allow unconscious bias to shape shortlists, they are not protecting standards. They are limiting perspective, continuity, and long-term strength.”
Why experienced candidates are scrubbing age clues from their CVs
Daniel explains that the behaviour has quietly become standard practice among senior candidates, particularly those with 20 or more years of experience.
“It is rarely discussed openly, but when candidates feel comfortable enough to be candid, the reasoning is consistent – they have either been burned before, or they know someone who has.”
“It’s worth asking what it means when experienced professionals feel that the most strategic thing they can do is make themselves look like less of what they are,” he says. “That’s not a candidate problem, but rather that’s a signal about what the market has taught them to expect.”
“A CV is supposed to be a record of what someone has achieved. When experienced professionals start thinking about what to leave out rather than what to put in, it raises a question worth sitting with – what does that say about the confidence people have in being evaluated fairly?”
What the law says, and what candidates are living by
Age discrimination in hiring has been unlawful in the UK since the Equality Act 2010, and yet the volume of experienced candidates quietly engineering their applications tells a different story about how well that protection translates in practice, Daniel notes.
“The legislation exists, but candidates aren’t feeling it,” he says. “There’s a significant gap between what the law prohibits and what people are actually experiencing when they go through a hiring process, and that gap is wide enough that candidates have stopped waiting for it to close.”
He adds that the pattern becomes harder to ignore when you look at what candidates are actually doing in response. “Removing a graduation year is one thing, but restructuring an entire career timeline to avoid a date inference is another. When someone with two decades of directly relevant experience keeps getting screened out at the CV stage, they stop attributing it to bad luck fairly quickly,” he says. “And when they start making edits not to strengthen their application, but to protect it, that tells you something about where trust in the process currently sits.”
“It also puts candidates in an uncomfortable position ethically,” he notes. “Most of them don’t want to misrepresent themselves; they want to be hired on merit, but they’re making a calculated decision that full transparency may cost them the opportunity to prove that merit in the first place.”
How employers can challenge age bias in hiring
Daniel says tackling age bias in CV screening requires both structural change and cultural reflection.
“Age bias in hiring is rarely loud or deliberate. It tends to sit quietly in assumptions about adaptability, energy, salary expectations, or cultural fit. Recruiters and employers need to recognise that experience is not a liability to manage but an asset to value. When senior candidates are overlooked because their career spans feel ‘too long’ or their graduation dates feel ‘too distant’, organisations risk filtering out resilience, institutional memory, and strategic judgement before the conversation has even begun.
Employers should begin by reviewing how CVs are assessed and how job descriptions are written. Removing unnecessary experience caps, focusing on competencies rather than career timelines, and training hiring managers to question their own assumptions are practical first steps. More broadly, organisations need to decide whether they want short-term alignment or long-term capability. If the goal is stability, mentorship, and informed decision-making, then retaining and attracting senior talent is not optional. It is a competitive advantage”.