"I'm 64 and I've become invisible. Am I finished?

"I noticed your posts on LinkedIn and decided to drop you a line.

I am 64. I spent eleven years running marketing for an engineering business, took it from a brochure and a trade stand to a meaningful marketing team, and was made redundant in November 2024 when the founders retired. I have counted that I have applied to 214 roles as I track them in an Excel.

My resume is strong, and I am able to get to screening calls. Then I meet someone on a call and I watch their face drop. I have been asked outright whether I would be comfortable reporting to a younger manager. I have been asked, three times, whether I still have the "energy" for a fast-paced environment. One recruiter told me the client wanted someone more "native" to the modern stack, which I took to mean born after 1990.

So, I have taken the dates off my degree. I have cut my first decade off my resume. And in recent cover letters I have added a short paragraph explaining, politely, that my age is not a problem, that I am fitter than most 40-year-olds, my family has a record of centenarians and I intend to work another ten years and that it would be a shame if chronology counted against me. My wife thinks this is foolish. I think it is honest, and what do I have to lose?

Alas, it has made no difference. I can pick up tools. I am competent at demand generation, I have rebuilt websites, I have spent the last year joining online courses as I am eager to learn. But I cannot get anyone to look past my wrinkled face.

Am I finished? Be honest with me. I would rather hear it confirmed than spend another year applying."

Al, North Carolina

Dear Al,

I don't think you should explain your age.

You are an experienced marketer. A very experienced marketer. Would you ever, in your working life, have opened a pitch by leading with "not as fast as the competitor, but honestly it's fine" on the front of a brochure? Of course not.

I don't think you should hide it or explain it. Leave it alone and control the agenda instead. Give them something more important to think about than your date of birth.

So, let's talk about what you give them instead. But please take my advice as an opinion and not a rule. Balance it with the views of others and make your own mind up.

From my point of view? Stop applying. You are playing a rigged slot machine. 214 applications feels like 214 spins in a casino that has already decided not to pay out to you. So, my advice would be to stop feeding it.

Careers portals and Applicant Tracking Systems are precisely where age is filtered, first by software and then by a bored human doing a five second scan (if it ever gets that far). You cannot out-argue a filter. You are pouring your one non-renewable resource, which is your time, into the one channel engineered to reject you fastest.

I have a neighbour named Clive, who worked until he was 76. In his fifties and sixties he went through a phase of being laid off, hired, laid off again and hired again, and he got every single job through personal contacts. The one and only application that ever worked for him was for a seasonal part-time retail job at See's Candies at 64, which he took to keep himself busy while he hunted properly. The older you get, the more this is the ratio you should expect, and with the advent of ATS, and now AI, I think it's reaching a peak.

When somebody already knows you, your age has already been priced in. The person who refers you doesn't give two hoots about your age and probably doesn't know it. The person they refer you to knows you're on the older end of the spectrum, before you walk in. Nobody is discovering anything. The conversation starts at what you can do, because the "age thing" was declared unimportant compared to the strength of the recommendation before the meeting was booked. Think of your contacts as running interference for you. They are pre-qualifying the employer on your behalf and doing it without you having to sit through the screening call and watch the face drop.

My personal advice would be to hunt companies, not jobs.

Most marketing problems have not become job adverts yet, and by the time they have, HR is involved and the filter is switched on. So go back through your years of suppliers, agencies, contractors, peers and customers, and ask each of them one question. Not "do you know of anybody hiring." Ask: who do you know who would benefit from a man with my experience and skills? Everybody knows someone with a problem. And you might be the solution.

Then ask your friend to secure the meeting, and bring that new contact a plan, not a resume.

This is where all your years are a weapon rather than a liability. Do the homework you would do if you already had the job. Ask the questions that no AI assistant would ever suggest. Look at their site, their positioning, everything in the public domain or the tools your friends can get access to, and hand them a short, sharp diagnosis of what you could focus on for them and what it could be worth to them.

Something that makes a managing director think, "well, I wouldn't say no to that."

If you manage to create a really compelling value proposition positioning yourself in the context of their problems and challenges, nobody in that conversation is going to ask whether you have the energy for a fast-paced environment. They will be too busy wishing their existing employees were so proactive.

Make sure you brief your network properly. "I'm looking for anything, really, in marketing" is a terrible, terrible brief. Your friends want to help you. Most people do. But you have to give them something to work with, and a man who wants "a marketing job somewhere" gives them nothing to hold on to.

So, position yourself. Pick the lane. Whatever it is for you, make it narrow enough that when your contact is standing in a car park next week and someone mentions a problem, your face appears in their head unbidden. That is the entire job of positioning, and you have done it for other people for forty years. Do it for yourself.

And go small while you are at it. If I were you, I would spend very little time on the large corporates and almost all of it on small and mid-sized businesses. In a large company you are a data point in a system designed to reduce you to one. In a small one you are a person, with a name, sitting across a table from the person who actually decides. Small firms also tend to be run by people who have felt the cost of inexperience personally, in cash, and who therefore understand what forty years of pattern recognition is worth. Clive's last boss put it best. He said he had never understood the concept of "overqualified," and could not see why he would ever turn away someone with more to offer.

On the younger manager question, the honest answer is that ageism is a door that swings both ways, and the interviewer is not entirely mad to ask.

They have all met the older hire who treats a 34-year-old boss as an amusing junior to be humoured. Tell them you have worked for people younger than you before and expect to again, that you will treat your manager as your manager, and that the best young leaders you have known were the ones who deliberately hired people who knew more than they did, because they were confident enough to do it.

If you have some financial flexibility, work out honestly what is necessary and what is merely nice to have. Clive found that once he stopped looking for money and started looking for the content of the work, the search opened up a little. Everything you give up buys you something else. Decide in advance what you are prepared to trade.

And get in shape.

You told me you are fitter than most 40-year-olds. Stop telling employers that. Start doing it for yourself, as it's completely within your control. It is the one input where effort reliably produces a result, and that sense of accomplishment will fuel everything else you do. Get off your backside and get your mojo back, because they will hear it in your voice long before they see your face.

Finally, stop trying to teach the pig to sing. "Never try to teach a pig to sing, because it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

Ageism is real and it is wrong, but don't make it your problem. Fighting it, case by case, interview by interview, will eat away at you. So, route around it. Find the employers who don't care, or better still the ones who actively want what only time can buy, and give them everything you have.

Then, when you are in, see if you can help them hire the next you. That is how this actually gets fixed, and it will not be fixed by any of us writing about it.

You still have a lot to give!

Onwards!

Rich