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.
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.