The HR Screen Is the Wrong Market for an Older Engineer
After 18 months without a full-time gig, I stopped treating the standard HR application as my main route to work and started contacting decision makers directly.
TL;DR
After 18 months without a full-time paying gig, I stopped assuming that the standard HR application was the best way to find work. I am a contractor and consultant, and I typically seek short-term gigs lasting 6 to 24 months. My research suggests that an applicant tracking system does not need an age filter. It can screen out older engineers through proxies such as career length, titles, and compensation expectations. Direct outreach put me in front of a real decision maker within 20 minutes.
I sent my first direct introduction on a Sunday at about four in the afternoon. The recipient was a principal investigator at a university research lab. I found his contact information via an online database my deep-research AI task found.
I sent the email, left to run an errand at Best Buy, and did not expect an immediate answer.
When I checked my email later, he had replied. He said he had forwarded my information to his CTO and suggested that I call back in two weeks if I had not heard from them.
That is one response. It is not a contract. It does not prove a new business-development method. It was still infinitely more useful and satisfying than most of the applications I have submitted through conventional channels.
The screen does not need an age field
I had been researching a question that many older engineers ask themselves: Is it a complete waste of my time to apply for a contract gig or another gig through the standard HR interface?
I gave the question to my local AI with an extensive set of search instructions. The research took about 20 minutes. The conclusion was predictable.
Applicant tracking systems are not necessarily programmed to reject resumes from older engineers. They may not have an age field at all. They do not need one if the process picks up signals associated with age and uses those signals to decide which resumes move forward.
Those signals can include a long work history, senior titles, older technologies, a record of substantial responsibility, or an apparent mismatch with the level and pay range of the gig. Your resume is not deleted. It simply may never reach someone who can understand what you can do.
I want to be careful here. This is the result of my research and my experience, not a controlled study of every hiring system. Age discrimination is also illegal, and the actual rules and practices vary by employer. The practical problem remains: an automated funnel can make it very difficult for an experienced person to explain the value of their experience.
Find the person with the problem
Once I understood the problem this way, I changed the question.
Instead of asking, “Which gigs will accept my resume?” I asked, “Who has a problem that requires the combination of skills I have?”
In my case, I looked for principal investigators in university, medical, and pharmaceutical laboratories. I was interested in people with products they were trying to take to market and problems that crossed several boundaries: software development, embedded systems, regulatory affairs, and workflow automation.
That search produced more than a hundred possible contacts. The list is still only a list. It will contain bad leads, dead ends, and people who are busy. But it gives me a path to people who may actually recognize the problem I can help solve.
The difference is important. An HR screener is usually trying to match a resume to a requisition. A principal investigator or CTO is trying to get a product, experiment, or program unstuck. Those are different conversations.
Older engineers still have useful combinations of experience
It is easy to lose yourself in the excitement of AI. I have done that myself. The tools are genuinely fun, and they make it possible to learn and build at a remarkable pace.
We still have bills to pay, though. Eighteen months without a full-time gig is long enough to make that impossible to ignore.
My current hypothesis is that experienced engineers need to spend less time trying to win the approval of a generic funnel and more time finding the people who own a specific constraint. That may mean writing directly to a technical leader, joining a specialized community, asking for an introduction, or forming a local group where engineers can compare what is working.
I am considering starting such a group. The question would be practical: how do we put valuable skills in front of people who need them, when the usual gatekeepers do not understand what they are looking at?
I would like to start a networking group with many older and/or displaced engineers that still have value they want to contribute in a paid gig. I know there are many capable people in this situation. I see it every single day here on LinkedIn. If this is you and you want to participate in a real way, reach out. I’d love to talk with you. I love solving difficult and important problems. If you do too, I want to hear from you.