Remem­ber back when you were 14 and 18 was cool because you could vote, 21 cooler because you could drink and 30 was old. After that it would be all down hill for sure.

But, the mind doesn’t age at the same rate as body does. My men­tal age is a sexy 28 (woohoo!) as cal­cu­lated by CDR. I could have guessed that with­out tak­ing the test. Wait, we’re not really here to talk about my mind in par­tic­u­lar. I’m afraid it would take down the server this is hosted on.

The point is, men­tal age, apti­tude and atti­tude com­bined with up to date skills and the desired level of expe­ri­ence should be all that mat­ters when we talk about tal­ent. Instead, lately I have been hav­ing requests to talk about 2nd life pas­sions, lis­tened to col­leagues talk about being wor­ried about being knocked out going under the limbo stick of 50, and read­ing about Hard Times for Job Hunt­ing Boomers  and ageism.

AARP, leave me alone.… I’m sure I’ll love you some day but I am SO not there yet!

It’s sad when a 49 year old woman sell­ing real estate in Vir­ginia is doing Hol­ly­wood style botox to look younger to stay com­pet­i­tive in the job mar­ket and con­sul­tants have to sug­gest older work­ers men­tion their use of newer tech­nol­ogy in their searches.

The bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics  Employee Tenure Study cites 4.1 years as the aver­age time a U.S. worker stays in the same job. A cou­ple of months ago, a col­league of mine, Jeff Lip­schultz wrote an inter­est­ing blog post on the trend of shorter tenure at jobs, 40 Jobs in 40 Years? Fact or Fic­tion? While I think 40 might be stretch­ing it, even the gov­ern­ment rec­og­nizes peo­ple are not retir­ing from their one and only.

So, what’s the big deal? The 49 year old botox queen shouldn’t have to worry about the taut-skinned 20-something sack­ing her job because regard­less of age, the like­li­hood either one of them is going to last more than 4 years there is unlikely. Every­one is “reca­reer­ing” not just the peo­ple who truly do qual­ify for an AARP mem­ber­ship with its up to 50% dis­count on hotels in North America.

My Recruiter friends need not be afraid of mature can­di­dates and my HR buds need to work dili­gently to edu­cate hir­ing man­agers on per­for­mance based inter­view skills. Can­di­dates of every age need to be razor sharp in this acutely com­pet­i­tive war for tal­ent, make it unques­tion­able in the inter­view why they are the only one for the job and leave the hir­ing man­ager with the clear feel­ing that if they don’t snap you up it’s their loss.

Thirty isn’t old any­more, the way the Social Secu­rity Admin­is­tra­tion keeps upping retire­ment age, it’s the new 50.