I'm currently in the job market despite having a pretty chill job working in a retail/warehouse environment as a Front-End Supervisor/cashier. I've been with my current employer for five years now, and I'm really good at my job. Customers always praise me for being fast and accurate, as well as friendly. But the work is catching up to my body. My feet hurt constantly, my legs are stuff all of a sudden, I generally feel like crap warmed over. Maybe I'm just getting old.
In the past I've worked as a Software Support Technician/analyst/engineer/ whatever it's called these days, so I literally have like 30 years of customer service experience to draw upon. I keep my resume fairly updated, especially while I'm looking for work, which is rare, because once I get into a groove, I prefer to stay in that groove. Maybe that just comes with being oldER. But I've been searching on and off since 2023, but this weekend (Thursday for me) I started making a dedicated effort, because I can't tolerate the foot pain anymore. I'm ingesting way too much Ibuprofen daily, and I know things have got to change.
I took a look at my current resume, which hasn't been performing all that well. It's a slick design, very eye-catching, and well laid out, but, computers don't care about that form of presentation. So over the past two days I've been completely reworking my resume to use an ATS format. It's bland, boring, and kinda hard to read for human eyes. It's ultra simple. And I've removed most of my previous work experience, because it's mostly retail and warehouse work related, which is something that I don't want to do anymore. I'm looking for a decent paying office/desk job. I'll even do call center if I have to just to get my foot wet again, but I hated all the micromanagement, quotes, KPMs and whatever management is using to stalk employees over with these days.
The biggest problem I've noticed while searching for a job recently is all the unprofessional ghosting that employers are doing. Like, there's a total lack of common courtesy, hiring managers don't get back to you, and you've gotta jump through several interviews just to be told "we've decided to go in a different direction." You truly have to know somebody at a company who's in the good graces with management to even get an eyeball glancing your direction. And that's a huge problem for somebody like me, who's fairly isolated socially. Because my working schedule gives me Thursdays and Fridays off, I don't really get a chance to mingle with people, form friendships, even casual ones, and it doesn't help that I moved to the Northeast right at the onset of the icky Covid-crap. So my life has been work, work, work, work, work, with very little time to explore my new residence.
Another problem I have with being an older candidate is my age. Most employers don't want to deal with somebody who has the guts to say "No, you're invalidating my boundaries", for extra, uncompensated work for example. Some managers are simply intimidated by older people, some managers honestly believe that older employers are just stupid, or don't know what they're doing, or whatever. I've removed my education from my resume too, because it's useless. After attempting college three different times during my life, I couldn't do it. Too much stress, too little time to study. I gave up. And that looks really bad to an employer. But the current Job Market is so crappy right now, I've seen people who can't even get a job saying the phrase "Do you want fries with that?"
