So she left her last contract job early after only 3 months, put a 4-5 month gap on her resume, waited to start interviewing until after hundreds of thousands of tech employees were laid off into an economic downturn, and she’s wondering why she hasn’t been immediately offered a job?
Look, interviewing is always tough. You have to remember that it’s not just you versus the company in an interview. It’s you versus the tens or hundreds of other qualified people who applied for the job. If you’re not the best of those applicants, you’re not getting an offer.
In an economic downturn with massive layoffs, the number of extremely qualified candidates is huge. I know people hate to hear this, but having the combination of a short 3-month job on your resume followed by a 5 month gap doesn't look good when compared to the 5 other resumes these companies are going to receive from people who are currently employed or who were recently laid off from well-known companies.
Stories like this are written to appeal to people who don’t like being rejected from interviews (See? It’s not you, it’s the system that is wrong for not hiring you!) but that’s not really helping anything other than soothing egos. It’s time we start being honest that hiring is a numbers game, there are a lot of qualified candidates on the market, and having a job cut short to 3 months followed by a long gap is a warning flag on a resume. If someone finds themselves in this situation with a limited financial runway in the middle of a huge tech recession, they need to start applying to huge numbers of jobs the moment they leave their 3-month contract job early. Waiting until the end of a sabbatical and only applying to a small number of jobs without network referrals is statistically unlikely to produce good results. It’s not really an indictment of the system, the author has just stacked the deck against themselves going into an economic downturn and is surprised that hiring has done a complete 180 since this time a year ago.