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Comment by sumtechguy | Hacker News Reader

My last job search it came up a lot. I took about 8 months then started looking. Because I could at that time. Since it was the current thing I was doing it came up a decent amount.

Took probably double the amount of time to get a job. I finally asked someone why they cared? They said it looks like others were passing me up for some reason and they did not want to pick someone up who everyone else was passing up.

Hiring in many ways is a guess if you can stand to work with someone or not. Being in any way undesirable hurts you.

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If I had a voluntary gap like this and I put something like "Sabbatical" on my resume and made a few notes of how I spent my time I wonder how that would go over. The last time I was in the interview process I saw my interviewer as a kind of interviewing pro, it wasn't until I got hired that I realized he was just a guy and he had really only interviewed and on-boarded a handful of people before.

I think that is pretty common on resumes and I've never heard anyone raise it as an issue. Some examples I've seen include "cycled across europe" and went back to school to work on a new degree, but then decided that they didn't like marine biology as much as they thought they did. There's no reason most employers would be concerned about reasonable life choices.

What employers are concerned about is people problems and problem people. Dealing with problem employees is very unpleasant and a huge time sink. Since difficult people tend to have difficulty staying employed, time gaps and short engagements on resumes are a somewhat reasonable heuristic. When there are more applicants than you can interview, you have to prioritize the list somehow.

> Hiring in many ways is a guess if you can stand to work with someone or not.

This, although it seems not everyone got the memo, hence a recent conversation I had:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31528057

> Being in any way undesirable hurts you.

Does having gaps make you so though? I'd say not necessarily. I mean, isn't there a workforce shortage at the moment?

Personally, I don't care. I just checked a recent candidate of mine and he... didn't put months in the start/end dates of his projects. If there's a gap there, I wouldn't even know.

So the opposite of FOMO... Hiring is broken.

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