There is nothing quite as depressing as feeling as if you have wasted the past 20 years of your life. But that’s exactly how I felt at the beginning of this year when, at the age of 54, I was trying to find a job in one of the toughest markets I’ve ever known.
I had been applying since late 2025, when my last freelance gig working as a senior strategist at a global content agency had ended after eight months, but all I had to show for it was an inbox full of automated rejections.
Honestly, this was a bit of a first for me. I had always picked up jobs pretty swiftly in the past, whether it was full-time roles or freelance work, but job hunting in my 50s was brutal.
My savings were running out fast, so I had been frantically applying for everything from senior roles, which matched my experience, to more junior roles and even, in a fit of desperation, as a bra fitter for M&S. But each application (and I sent hundreds) was met with either silence or a curt rejection.
Well, apart from the job at M&S, where they invited me for an interview, but when I tried to book using their automated system it continually told me there were no available slots. About two months later I got a polite rejection email saying it had been nice to meet me at the interview (I’d never been able to book one), but they were going with another candidate. For me this just summed up the farcical nature of job hunting when you take the humanity out of it.
It was a sorry state to find myself in after spending the last couple of decades smashing it in a career in content, a catch-all term for writing, editing and filming for websites and social media. I had held senior global roles, including being a director at one of the country’s best-known private health insurers, given masterclasses and won awards. But all this experience counted for nothing in a job market where AI makes the decisions and too much expertise is a distinct disadvantage.
It’s no surprise that I was finding it hard to find a role at my age as figures from the Office for National Statistics show that unemployment for those aged 50-64 has risen steadily in the past five years. The problem is that while our parents might have been gently coasting towards a comfortable retirement by their mid-fifties, my generation isn’t so lucky. Steep house prices, having children later, an ever-rising pension age and better health mean that many of us have to, or want to, work until we are much older.
I was desperate to find a job, partly for the salary, but also because I love to work and being at home and unemployed left me feeling depressed and useless. That’s when I read about CV Botoxing. The clue is in the name. This is a practice where, rather than smooth out the wrinkles in your forehead, you artfully airbrush your career history to make yourself appear more youthful and thereby employable.
Each application that Ursula Hirschkorn sent off was met with either silence or a curt rejection
Since botoxing her CV, Ursula secured four interviews in two weeks, which is more than she got in the previous six months
Botox wasn’t something I’d ever considered before, either for my face or my CV. I had learned how to write a resume during a stint at a posh secretarial college when I was 18, so my self promotion skills were stuck in the dark ages. Luckily there are experts in the art of CV Botoxing who can help.
Executive CV writer Sarah Lovell, who charges up to £400 to write killer resumes, admits that she has clients who ask her about this. ‘I don’t encourage it. If an employer wants to hire a 25-year-old they are not going to recruit someone in their 50s.’ But when she looks at my CV she says she can help me knock at least a decade off it without straying into downright deception.
Lovell has been a full-time CV writer for the past 14 years and now employs her daughter to help her cater for the growing number of ageing executives who need her help. Despite my pleas to make me look like a Gen Z, she firmly maintains that honesty is still the best policy.
‘I always advise clients to be transparent, be who you are – just don’t overdo it by oversharing. Recruiters really don’t care about anything before 2010, so I naturally Botox CVs to focus on what employers are looking for.’
I sent her my CV to see where it was showing my age and the wrinkles appeared before we even get on to my employment history. ‘Calling it a Curriculum Vitae is the first thing you need to get rid of. Only your generation calls them this now, so this instantly ages you,’ she explains, leaving me red-faced with embarrassment. Ditch the Latin, she says, and just use CV.
The elephant in the room is that most of our CVs aren’t screened by humans any more – instead businesses use AI-powered Applicant Tracking Systems. So Lovell says the real key is to tailor your CV to make it attractive to the bots. This is something older applicants like me often get wrong. It turns out a lot of my CV is pure waffle that needs to go since AI likes things clean and simple. ‘Use bullet points, clear headings and include keywords that relate to the jobs you are applying for,’ Lovell advises.
Be ruthless when it comes to trimming your CV and ditch vague phrases. Instead use data to highlight what you’ve achieved. Lovell warns me not to waste my time telling recruiters what they already know. Instead of saying that I was a senior leader, I should point out that I led a team of five, mentoring two into management positions. This jars with my old-fashioned notions of modesty, but it’s dog eat dog in today’s market so I have to learn to show off about myself more and with Lovell’s brutal honesty I learnt to.
It was a bruising experience recognising quite how outdated my CV was. It hadn’t been properly reviewed in over ten years, but I followed Lovell’s advice to create a more youthful resume and it worked. Since botoxing my CV I secured four interviews in two weeks, which is more than I got in the previous six months. I went on to interview for a very well-paid senior role as a strategy director and reader, with a similar salary to what I was earning in my last job in the City and I was offered it.
