I have some gaps on my resume. So, apparently I am the antichrist.
I told one recruiter about a co-worker I had who had no gaps on his resume. He would come to work and spend the entire day playing games or texting and calling his girlfriend. I am certain he would get chosen for numerous jobs over me even though I am a workaholic.
Gaps are meaningless! The world is too random and using your imagination to imagine the worst when there is a gap on a resume is foolish.
I had one recruiter annoyed with me because I have a large gap on my resume for the time when I was a full-time student in college. I’m not making that up. She wanted an explanation for why I wasn’t working. Recruiters are ridiculous!
Just like with other forms of discrimination people could still judge you silently and withhold a job from you but at least it would stop the harassment by recruiters about gaps.
I’m 35.
I left school at 16. Did a year at collage before deciding it wasn’t for me. I then spent a year doing nothing. Not totally unusual for a 17/18 year old. I then spent 15 years working for the same company, without any gaps in my employment.
To say I was surprised when the interviewer asked about the gap in my resume from 15 years previous when I’m a 34 year old would be an understatement; it was literally half a lifetime ago.
Fifteen years at the same company bro, that’s the important part of that résumé, not the 8 months that a 17 year old kid had off. Fuck me.
I would have told the recruiter that detail was unimportant, and I wouldn’t be answering any further questions about that subject.
Wow! That is an extreme level of ridiculousness!
Change your resume to hide that gap. What’s another 8 months tacked on to 15 years?
Yeah I’ll be doing that going forward. Truth be told I did some volunteer work during that time, but I didn’t deem it overly relevant to the job I was going for, plus with it being 15 years ago…you know.
No! You must spend your ENTIRE LIFE working, no exceptions!
As our corporate lords intended
One recruiter (who was there head of recruiting at this company) I talked with several years ago drilled me on why I had switched jobs every 2-3 years. Tell me you know nothing about the modern job market without telling me you know nothing about the modern job market…
One of my best friends was a recruiter with a major company. It was her first job after graduating college. One of her major frustrations? People who would write “see resume” on the application which was full of repetitive questions that were answered by the resume.
“But I don’t even have their resumes! That’s why the questions were on the application!” I wanted to ask (and should have asked) why don’t you, the recruiter, have the resumes? If you don’t have them, then where did they go?
They want employees who don’t know about the modern job market and will stick it out.
My ex has been in a shitty job for years that doesn’t pay her enough and calls her “salary” so they don’t have to pay for all the overtime, despite her not meeting the qualifications of an exempt employee.
But she’s so afraid of change that she still works there.
That’s what employers want in their staff.
Yeah. That is silly. Job hopping every 2-3 years is perfectly normal and expected. That said, job hopping every 6-9 months is a big red flag. When I find I hate a new job, I try to stick it out until the 1.5 yr mark, as that’s about the minimum before it starts to look bad.
The advice I heard (which, granted, was given in the context of moving around internally to my command) was that you’ll hate any new job for the first year, and to give it at least a year and a half before looking to move again.
That said, there will always be jobs you just absolutely cannot do for one reason or another, and don’t stick those out to try to make the resume look better.
Oh yeah 100%. If you really hate a job or boss, it isn’t worth staying.
Employer here. Please understand, almost all recruiters are useless and unqualified. A great number of them are also just plain stupid.
When it comes to gaps, just lie. Honestly, all we give a fuck about is if you can do the job well. One of the better lies I’ve heard of, if you’re in tech, is to list your gap as employment with a startup in stealth mode. It shows that you are valuable enough to bring in early and there is no way to officially verify your story. Just don’t half ass the lie. Make sure you have a name for it and a story about what it was about. A friend can be your reference if they really want to be a pain.
So like I could say “I cannot answer that”
Or like “It’s classified”
Or like "I can’t talk about that
My brother had a 3 year gap, and when he applied for his current job (civil service job, even) and they asked about the gap, his response was “I signed an NDA about that, I can tell you in 2052,” and just refused to speak further on it. Complete bullshit, but even a job with the US federal government just let it go.
You can state that you are bound by an NDA but you can say that it was within the <lie> field. That works as long as you actually have strong knowledge in the field you lied about.
Another thing you can try is using the gap lie to insert a new skill you worked on during your off time. For example, let’s say that you took courses and became certified in something like Container Orchestration. Now let’s say that you went out of your way to even get some hands on knowledge by using your new skills in a cloud and/or home lab environment. If you have zero wok experience in that newly learned skill, then it is basically useless as far as your resume is concerned. If that sound like unfair bullshit it’s because it is. So why not put your gap lie to work? State in your resume that one of the primary skills that you used in your time with the startup was the skill you learned. Say that you cannot go into product details because of your NDA but use your home projects and experiments as if they were actual tasks of your fake job. It is not unusual for startups to pay for new hires to be trained in new technology so that they can multi-task. In true startup mode, many devs are also sysadmins, DBA, manage source control, etc.
Be creative, be confident, and make sure that you can back up your bullshit with skill by your start date.
You can say you worked at Twitter. After the chaos becoming X they aren’t going to be able to confirm or deny if the recruiter tries to confirm.
Providing hospice care for a child or spouse is a good one too, make them feel like assholes for asking.
That gap? Oh, I was in the foreign legion. I’m not allowed to talk about it. Now where were we?
Which foreign legion?
The foreign legion
It’s just that secret
You do know you don’t have to answer truthfully. And also the recruiter/employer doesn’t really care except if it is one of a few things.
Answer in a way that doesn’t make it sound like you were in jail or involved in a lawsuit, and you’re good.
You left one position and used your severance for a few month trip to see your parents.
You volunteered at a non-profit to clear your head.
You had a non compete clause that was compensated for by your previous employer.
Whatever.
Answer in a way that doesn’t make it sound like you were in jail or involved in a lawsuit, and you’re good.
You would think that jail or lawsuit like you suggest is all that would matter. However, I went to Mexico a few years and spent 6 months in a Spanish school full time and I can tell you that not a single recruiter or hiring manager likes that I did that. They conjure up this notion that I am not a slave and that I might up and quit and go on a trip again.
So, like I previously stated they use their imagination to imagine the worst. Any time that is not at a job is a negative. Even school does not count.
Lol no they don’t, you’re being absurd
Nah, school does count. I’ve given dozens of interviews, I usually don’t worry about having every month accounted for. School is fine, taking a few months and living off savings is fine too. If I’m going to have to work with this person I want someone cool, I’d respect someone taking time off for themselves.
6 months in Spanish school is a perfect explanation, a few years in Mexico though, you literally just glossed over years of your life. Are you younger and you were living with family? Were you running drugs for a cartel? The former is fine, the latter would be a red flag.
They just want to know what you’ve been up to, if you refuse to account for years of your life that’s weird, I don’t know why that’s such a problem
Because it’s none of their fucking business, that’s why. What does what I do outside of work have to do with my qualifications to do the work?
Oh, ok then
Think of it more like you’re meeting a new friend, you’re just hanging out and taking. Would it be a problem for someone to ask about your time in Mexico in a social setting?
Employers are not your friends. Employers are people who want you to do as much as possible for as little as possible. Regardless of one’s political views, employers are not friends. It is an uneasy alliance at best and an outright war at the best of times. Wanna be friends? Help me unionize this workplace, bro.
Damn, you must have had some terrible bosses or worked some really shitty jobs for you to be so jaded.
It’s not being jaded. It’s a reality. The employers base interest is creating wealth for the company, the employees base interest is generating income for themselves. These two conditions are fundamentally at odds. That’s why we speak about “negotiations” when it comes to wages. We are attempting to balance the two sides. The employer wants the employee to perform the most amount of labor for the smallest possible compensation, the employee wants the largest compensation for the least amount of labor.
I’m not suggesting all employers are bad people, or that there aren’t people who are employers who are friends with their employees. I am saying the employer, in their role as employer, is not a friend to the employee. Their interests do not align, and if they did, either you have a masochistic boot licking employee, or an employer who is going to fail and take their business down with them.
My mom ran a successful business for 25 years, was good friends with her employees outside of work, but in her role as the employer occasionally had to do things that went against her nature, by the simple fact that her business needed to survive more than her friendship did.
I ran a successful business for 5 years before illness took it from, and likewise, in my role as employer, I could not make the decisions I wished I could have. Had I known about worker’s cooperatives at the time, I likely would have transitioned it to that to save the company when we were no longer able to do the work in the same way. C’est la vie.
This isn’t about being jaded, it’s about understanding how our economic system works at it’s core. A small, but significantly powerful group on one side, a large but mostly powerless group on the other. Each has their own interest, and the balancing act is figuring out how to get the most out of the other.
Answer in a way that doesn’t make it sound like you were in jail or involved in a lawsuit, and you’re good.
Recruiter: “So, tell me about this gap in your CV.”
You: “I’m not permitted to answer any questions about that period of my life unless the files are declassified. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
Recruiter: “Ha ha.”
You: “No. Seriously. Let’s move on.”
Real secrets have cover stories.
“I can’t discuss that beyond saying that I signed an NDA”
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100% agreed with the opinion, but just as a practical point, talking poorly about people you used to work with (even those who definitely deserve it) is an immediate dealbreaker for a lot of recruiters/HR. So even being valid, talking negatively about other people without employment gaps probably isn’t helping you the way it should.
You are correct. I don’t do that regularly. That specific time I had already lost the job and I was venting my frustration to this one recruiter who was not going to give me the job due to a job gap. I was trying to talk some sense to him and explain how gaps are a meaningless way to value a human being but I knew it wasn’t going to work. I had already lost the job and that was just at the tail end of the conversation.
Ah makes sense, hope they thought on it as they should!
Just tell them you had to take care of personal commitments during that/those periods.
But what we really need is a jobs program like FDR did. Hell, we can even just redo the infrastructure we did the first time.
Giving money to the rich and hoping some trickles down hasn’t been working, why not true something that’s actually worked before?
Cuz it’s easier and more personally profitable for those who (are allowed to) participate in our government to join the other foxes currently raiding the henhouse.
"I’m not allowed to comment on that time. I signed an NDA with company I was interning for.
I don’t think this opinion is unpopular in the slightest, except among employers…
Oh, that gap in the mid to late 2000s? Let me direct you to the Wikipedia page. The Great Recession
Just FYI, in case it helps anyone. I work in acedemia and have worked in goverents positions. Academic and governmental institutions are so scared of being sued for discrimination that we have all kinds of rules about what you are and are not allowed to consider in a hiring decision. At least for the instiutions that I have worked for, asking about or considering gaps in work has been on the list of “no, you cannot ask anything about that”.
Yeah but why weren’t you working full-time while in college?
lol “full time student” isn’t an employment gap.
It is an issue, primarily because it disproportionately affects women (because stay at home moms), but it’s sincerely something you can’t legislate. An employment gap is time where you aren’t gaining experience someone else is.
You might be gaining different experience, and it’s unfortunate that in a lot of cases you won’t be able to get to an interview to talk about it, but being in the workforce, and fulfilling the requirements to keep your job (even if they are just show up and don’t be such a toxic mess your employer is forced to fire you) are things that directly have a bearing on your ability to be a good employee for their company. If you could exclude stay at home parents, I’m pretty confident that you would see a measurable difference in quality of employee between people who have steadily kept a job and people who haven’t, even if it’s a higher percentage of bad apples and not a lower median performance.
