Say what? I just did a double take when an article title popped up on my phone. “Are you over 45 and female? Sorry, you’re not getting a job.” And just like that, my nervous system delivered a nice cortisol cocktail right after my daily meditative walk.
The gist of the article? AI resume reviewers look at the length of work history and education dates to eliminate women over 40 from making it through the recruiting screening process.
I’ve done no fact-checking on this particular article or the sources behind it, so I’m not putting this out there for, as we say in the true crime community, “the truth of the matter.” Frankly, I don’t have time for that particular deep dive today. I’ve got to meditate for another 20 minutes to reduce the cortisol spike I just experienced.
However, as a 47-year-old woman, I’ve been feeling the anxiety of this idea myself. I was an executive at a mid-sized corporation in Atlanta. I have an MBA from Emory University. I’ve owned my own business for 12 years now. I’m sharing this brief bio as context for where my head is and why my nervous system just went into fight-or-flight (or freeze or fawn or whatever else we’ve added to this lately).
The point is, I’ve thought about going back to a corporate career.
Owning my own consulting business has been amazing. AND it requires me to hunt and sell and market and hunt and sell and market again. Part of my idea behind starting my own business was to control my schedule. Cue the laughing from anyone who has owned or started a business.
If you thought matrix companies, where individuals report to two different organizations, were difficult to work for, start your own B2B business. Instead of reporting to one boss or two organizations, you’re now reporting to 15 or 20 or 200, all with competing priorities. So owning your calendar is incredibly difficult for most entrepreneurs.
And I’ve felt like working for one person might give me a little more control over my calendar IRL.
But when I started diving into the process- what it would take to put myself back out there in the corporate world- I had no idea where I would start. Putting a resume together felt daunting. And I feel like I’m in what should be the prime of my career, and yet, I’ve been a little worried about the idea of being invisible now that I’m a “woman of a certain age,” as the article says.
After reading the article, it occurs to me that landing a corporate job that I would both like and that would suit my level of skills and expertise would require some good referrals. The real hard thinking is figuring out whether my network relationships are warm, or whether hunting, marketing, and selling have turned my network into a client roster instead of a peer group network.
Why Women Executives Need a Peer Group
Here’s the crazy part. I’ve been sleeping next to the answer because my husband participates in EO and YPO forums. And he runs his own peer groups for CEOs called Flourish Advisory Boards. (Which makes it worse because I do their marketing!) He’s been building these kinds of relationships for years.
I started writing the list of people I could call to reconnect, ask for a referral, or get advice. And the list is much lighter than a great 25+ yr career should have produced.
The relationships we need take time to build and nurture. And I haven’t focused on doing that lately. What about you?
I don’t know that I’ll give up my business right now. But I do know there are so many benefits of having a business network that I’m making it a priority now. Because the bottom line is, you can’t build a network overnight. So you should make sure you have one before you need it.
