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human
CMV: Résumé's should contain tenure lengths rather than dates to avoid discrimination

Having recently helped a few former colleagues with job applications, it occurred to me that a simple "fix" could help eliminate a few forms of discrimination.

Common practice on a résumé is to list prior work and education experience with _dates_, e.g. "I was employed at company X June 2012 - May 2015", rather than (or in addition to) tenure length, e.g. "I was employed at company X for 2 years, 11 months".

I think this is problematic for (at least) three reasons:

1. Age discrimination. It is illegal (in the US at least) to discriminate against someone for being too old, and (in my state) it's even illegal to ask about age or leading questions (or if not strictly illegal, legally discouraged). However, by listing the years you attended school or had a first job, it's impossible to ignore age. Of course, you might be able to infer age by looking at experience (e.g. if you worked on a really old technology) or just total number of years, but I hypothesize that this would have a less negative effect. It would look like having a lot of experience, whereas seeing "graduated class of 1980" and then you think "wow that was before I was born" I think you (as a hiring manager) may be more likely to have a negative feeling associated with age here.

2. Gaps due to extended medical leave, e.g. raising children for a few years. A huge problem facing some professional women today who want to start families is getting back into the job market after a several year gap. I personally have heard from a few people who face this, and even if you've kept your skills up to date as best as possible, getting that first job after a gap can be super hard. Same if you had medical leave (physical or mental) or a gap due to caring for a family member. Or imagine you spent a year in prison falsely convicted and then were released and expunged of wrongdoing (don't want to derail this CMV to be about prison / criminals, just an example). By listing years of experience rather than dates, these gaps will be invisible at first glance.

3. The ability to leave off "bad" or "embarrassing" experience. Depending on the field, sometimes a resume can get dragged down by a bad name. E.g. imagine if you were some rank-and-file attorney at Enron or Lehman Brothers. Chances are you had nothing to do with the massive problems that happened there, but it could seem like a black mark. Or, maybe you took a job working tech support for a porn site and would rather leave that off your resume. In any of these cases it's probably not OK to lie to an interviewer about it, but not having it on you resume which is often a first impression could be a huge help. Resumes already don't need to be comprehensive (especially if you have a lot of experience and want to fit it on one page).

As far as how this should be achieved, I don't really want to get into a big policy debate but I think a reasonable step might be a law making it illegal to require exact dates, or at least just making it common / encouraged practice to use (only) tenure lengths instead.

Theoretically, people could just start doing this now, but without some kind of legal backing or at least making it a common and well-known practice, it wouldn't fly, especially when someone is in the (often) vulnerable position of applying for employment.

I also think there are some caveats here, for example if your employer needs to run a background check they might need to know your graduation or employment dates for confirmation (though I think that could fundamentally be avoided too, but confirming tenure lengths rather than dates). Similarly, as said above, asking about types of technologies or coworkers or anything like that during an interview might reveal information about dates, or perhaps past employers all need to be disclosed on a form during reference checks. That's fine, I think, but I still think they should stay off the resume to avoid tainting the initial impression of the interviewee.

EDIT: if a law were passed, it should be illegal for the _employer_ to ask for demand dates, no penalty for the employee (i.e. all existing resumes aren't suddenly illegal).

EDIT2: clarified my pregnancy example to be a few year gap rather than just the weeks of FMLA leave.

**tl;dr: by leaving the dates off a resume, discrimination due to age or gaps at first sight might be lessened. The dates aren't a secret, but maybe don't belong on the resume**
gpt
Wouldn’t this make it more difficult to verify employment? Another thing to consider is companies have good times and bad. Hiring someone who was in a position that was responsible for bad times is very different than hiring someone from the same position during that companies good times.