Bronxville Public Library

Looking for work at 61, with an unfair assistant

Nobody plans to be job hunting at 61. I was pushed, politely, in a restructuring, and the job market I landed in had changed more in eight years than in the previous thirty. Here is what the machine did for me, in order of value. It translated my resume. My old one read like 1989, duties and responsibilities, and the modern one reads like results, and the program rebuilt every bullet to say what actually happened, inventory shrink down 30 percent, trained eleven hires, rather than what I was responsible for. It coached me on the screen interview, which is a genre nobody over 55 has natural practice with, awkward camera, awkward lag, and it ran mock questions from actual hospital job postings until my answers had structure. It decoded postings, telling me which requirements were real and which were copy pasted wishes, which saved me from talking myself out of jobs I then got interviews for. What it did not do was get me the job. The handshake at the second interview, the thirty years of knowing how a warehouse actually runs, the references who answered their phones, that was mine, and the offer came through in March. The machine made me competitive on paper so I could win in person. At our age the danger is being filtered out before the human ever sees you. For a season, a well briefed machine is the advocate that gets your thirty years past the software and onto a desk.

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