A growing number of professionals are quietly trimming their resumes, removing early career roles and deleting graduation dates in an effort to appear younger to employers. The practice, known as “Resume Botox,” is not new. What is new is the age group adopting it and what that behaviour reveals about modern hiring systems.

Monster’s 2026 State of Resumes Report found that 77 per cent of job seekers worry their application is filtered out before a human ever sees it. Only six per cent believe resumes are read thoroughly. When candidates assume software, not people, are deciding their future, they adapt. “Across TikTok, LinkedIn and wherever resume advice is on offer, jobseekers are being urged to hide their ages to get hired,” reported Business Insider. “More and more workers are heeding the recommendation.”

Workers in their 30s and 40s, long considered to be in their professional prime, are now cutting entire decades from their experience to fit what they perceive as a safer hiring profile. The calculation is pragmatic. Too junior signals risk. Too senior signals cost. Too experienced may signal both.

Resume Botox is often framed as deception. In reality, it is market behaviour. Candidates are responding to incentives embedded in hiring systems. When depth feels like a liability, presentation shifts accordingly.

Experience, bias and the clarity gap

In Canada, age is a protected ground under human rights legislation. Omitting graduation dates or shortening work history is not equivalent to falsifying credentials. The legal boundary is relatively clear. The perception boundary is not.

Eddy Ng, professor of organizational behaviour and Smith professor in equity and inclusion in Business at Queen’s University, told HR Reporter that the trend reflects ongoing bias in how potential is assessed. “There is an obsession with youth in some of the industries that are out there, and people are aware of it,” Ng says.

That awareness shapes strategy. Include the full career arc and risk assumptions about adaptability or compensation. Trim it and increase interview odds. Data cited by Business Insider showed a 133 per cent year-over-year increase in jobseekers’ mentions of ageism between early 2024 and early 2025, reinforcing the perception that experience may not always be rewarded.

For employers, the issue is not resume formatting. It is signal clarity. If hiring language emphasizes narrowly defined recent experience without articulating broader capabilities, candidates will optimize for recency. If application systems appear opaque, candidates will assume automated exclusion. Behaviour follows perceived rules. Resume Botox is one of those adaptations.

Designing hiring systems that reward substance

Artificial intelligence is now an infrastructure in many recruitment processes. It allows employers to manage scale, consistency and speed that would be difficult manually. Used effectively, it reduces administrative burden and surfaces relevant qualifications efficiently. The presence of AI is not the core issue. Design and oversight are.

Transparency matters. Candidates want to understand how their applications are evaluated and where human review enters the process. Clear criteria and structured assessment frameworks reduce ambiguity. Ambiguity, by contrast, drives defensive resume editing.

Generative AI has also changed how applications are written. Many candidates use digital tools to refine language and tailor documents. That shift reflects digital fluency, not necessarily misconduct. The differentiator is whether the underlying experience and outcomes are substantive. Screening systems should ultimately reward demonstrated impact, not formatting polish.

The broader risk is strategic. When hiring systems unintentionally signal that longevity equates to cost or inflexibility, organizations narrow their own access to experience. Seasoned professionals bring institutional memory, crisis management skills and pattern recognition developed over time. In volatile markets, those attributes are stabilizing, not expendable.

Resume Botox suggests that some candidates believe hiring systems prioritize immediate alignment over cumulative capability. Whether fully accurate or not, that belief shapes behaviour. And behaviour, at scale, becomes culture.

If employers want authenticity, they must reward it. That means defining roles around competencies, outcomes and adaptability rather than tenure optics. It means communicating clearly how technology is used and ensuring human judgment remains visible. It means signalling that experience is evaluated as value, not cost.

Experience should not require concealment to compete. When professionals feel pressure to edit out years of contribution to be considered viable, the issue is not vanity. It is design. 

Resume Botox is a rational adaptation to perceived incentives. For organizations, it is feedback. In a labour market that is aging, digital and increasingly AI-enabled, the strongest competitive advantage may not be speed of screening, but clarity of criteria. When hiring systems reward substance consistently and transparently, candidates will respond in kind.