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.
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.