The modern job market is experiencing a troubling trend where workers in their 30s and 40s are increasingly forced to hide their age and experience to secure employment, with AI-powered hiring platforms potentially exacerbating the problem. A marketing strategist in Montreal, using the pseudonym Lily, applied to over 500 jobs over six months with no success until a resume consultant advised her to remove more than half of her 25-year career history. After scrubbing her resume to appear younger, interviews immediately started rolling in.
This phenomenon, dubbed “resume Botox,” has become a survival strategy in what career advisers describe as an upside-down job market where experience no longer guarantees opportunity. Glassdoor reported a 133% year-over-year increase in jobseekers’ mentions of ageism between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025, reflecting growing concerns about age discrimination during the ongoing white-collar recession.
AI hiring systems are under scrutiny for potentially amplifying existing biases. A Stanford study found that ChatGPT outputs showed clear bias against older working women and young people. Research suggests that large language models absorb and reproduce cultural prejudices, making age discrimination more systematic and harder to detect.
Legal challenges are mounting against AI recruitment platforms. In January 2025, a lawsuit was filed against Eightfold AI—whose technology is used by Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Starbucks, and PayPal—alleging its “opaque” methodology for ranking candidates should be subject to disclosure. A federal judge also advanced a collective-action lawsuit against recruitment giant Workday in May 2024, citing plausible age discrimination against candidates 40 and older.
Career adviser Josh Bob explains that employers now seek “the Goldilocks candidate”—someone not too young, not too old, ideally poached from a competitor. HR professional Jessica Ehlers notes that compensation concerns drive companies to avoid candidates with extensive experience, effectively squeezing out workers “in the 40 and up range.”
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) protects workers 40 and older, but proving “disparate impact”—where neutral policies disproportionately exclude older workers—remains challenging. Workers under 40 have virtually no legal protection, leaving those in their 30s vulnerable to age-based discrimination without recourse.
Key Quotes
AI-powered hiring platforms may be exacerbating the problem, as a growing body of research suggests large language models absorb and reproduce existing cultural prejudice.
This statement from the article highlights how AI systems used in recruitment are not neutral tools but rather amplify existing biases, making age discrimination more systematic and widespread across the hiring process.
You would figure that somebody who has 25 or 35 years of experience would actually be quicker to get up to speed because they’ve learned more things than somebody who has only 10 years of experience, but that’s not how hiring managers are perceiving things. Instead, hiring managers are thinking, ‘I need somebody who was doing this exact job yesterday.’
Career adviser Josh Bob explains the paradox driving resume Botox—where extensive experience becomes a liability rather than an asset, revealing how AI-driven hiring systems prioritize narrow pattern matching over broader competence.
It was like all of a sudden, the sun came out and everything cleared up.
Lily, the 48-year-old marketing strategist, describes the immediate impact of hiding 15 years of experience from her resume, demonstrating how AI screening tools and hiring systems systematically filter out older candidates before human review.
A new Stanford study on how generative AI characterizes workers across industries, for example, found that ChatGPT outputs showed a clear bias against older working women and young people.
This research finding provides empirical evidence that AI systems used in hiring contexts carry embedded biases that discriminate against specific demographic groups, raising serious concerns about algorithmic fairness in employment.
Our Take
The emergence of AI-powered hiring platforms as potential engines of age discrimination represents one of the most concerning applications of algorithmic decision-making in the workplace. While companies adopt these systems to increase efficiency and reduce costs, they’re inadvertently—or perhaps deliberately—automating bias at scale. The lawsuits against Eightfold AI and Workday signal a potential reckoning for the AI recruitment industry, which has largely operated without meaningful oversight or transparency requirements. What’s particularly troubling is how these systems create a feedback loop: as more experienced workers are filtered out, the training data for AI models becomes skewed toward younger candidates, further entrenching the bias. The Stanford research on ChatGPT’s biases suggests this problem extends beyond specialized recruitment tools to general-purpose AI systems that companies might use for screening. Until AI hiring platforms are required to demonstrate fairness through auditable processes, workers will continue gaming the system through “resume Botox,” ultimately degrading the quality of information available to employers while forcing qualified candidates to hide their most valuable assets.
Why This Matters
This story reveals a critical intersection between AI technology and workplace discrimination that threatens to reshape hiring practices across industries. As companies increasingly rely on AI-powered recruitment platforms to screen candidates, algorithmic bias is systematically excluding experienced workers based on age rather than qualifications. The 133% surge in ageism complaints signals that AI hiring tools may be automating and scaling discrimination in ways that are harder to detect and challenge legally.
The implications extend beyond individual jobseekers to the broader economy. When workers in their peak earning years—typically 30s and 40s—cannot secure employment commensurate with their experience, it represents a massive waste of human capital and expertise. The lawsuits against Eightfold AI and Workday could set important precedents for AI accountability and transparency in hiring, potentially forcing companies to audit their algorithms for bias. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in recruitment processes, understanding and addressing these discriminatory patterns is essential for ensuring fair employment practices and preventing the technology from entrenching existing inequalities at scale.
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Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/resume-botox-lying-millennials-careers-2026-2