It’s an imperfect signal, but when you have 200 resumes on your desk, it’s a good low pass filter.
You want candidates who need to work, want to work and are capable of working. A gap could indicate any number of less desirable situations.
-Chronic health issues
-Mental health issues
-Imprisoned
-Homeless
-Not financially hungry enough
-Poor job seeking skills leading to extended unemployment
-Anti-work in some way, alternative lifestyle
-Unusually large family care responsibilities
Should you have a gap, the best way to close it is to describe career-related activities you did during your gap or other personal development. Continuing education, side projects, personal projects, interesting detours like overseas charity work.
It’s not fair at all, but you need to know how to project a “Worksona” and not being able to market your real messy life as a shiny seamless ideal worker is also a signal you’ll be less professional.
And YOU may be a perfect excellent candidate with a gap, but I promise you that among that pile of 200 resumes are a lot of barely functional people with major struggles you do not want to let into your company.
Or why does it matter that they’re “not financially hungry enough”? Or that they have poor job seeking skills?
If anything, wouldn’t those last two mean the candidate would be unlikely to ask for raises or leave your company for another offer when you least expect it? The latter in particular has seemingly zero impact on someone’s dedication or skills (same with homelessness). Why would you prefer someone that’s good at finding work? That’s like looking to date someone who is good at starting new relationships, wouldn’t you rather someone who is good at maintaining them?
Homelessness could indicate drug addiction, mental health issues, poor history of financial decisions, lack of social support network (below average social skills). In a 200 resume pile, SOME of those people will have bad personal lives that could negatively affect their work performance, maybe not always, but perhaps episodically.
And there’s a Goldilocks zone of financial need. If you are too rich, then we might as well be paying you Monopoly money. Those people can act in unexpected ways since they live in a different incentive world than their team members. If someone is in dire financial straits, they might suddenly have their car repossessed or begin stealing from you. It’s standard to do a credit check for certain financial roles to make sure the candidate isn’t a theft risk.
I’ve wondered if this is a significant factor in the industry’s ageism. For the past maybe 15+ years, software engineers who would have had a really solid resume at age 25 often have significant financial flexibility by the time they are in their 40s. Some of them check out of the industry, some of them focus on more cause-like efforts, and the remaining ones might be less dependable for the company in terms of overworking than they used to be back when they were still more financially motivated.
I suppose people just don't like misfits (speaking as one who could also be described in such a way for a few reasons) and don't want to be made uncomfortable by their presence.
And yes, the right amount of financial dependence keeps the average employee in the seat and taking the work seriously.
Gracias :)
#parsing_pun
But many people are not like me and they think any stumble in the rat race is an insurmountable red flag.
I get filtering candidates with just a resume is not any easy thing to do and no matter how you decided to do it, some tough calls have to be made. But now I'm wondering who we may have missed out on considering because of some health issue, family issue or just decided to do something else for a year.
I don't want to work for someone that judgemental. I enjoy my work, and making good things, but also work is work. If an employer is going to judge me beyond just the skills I bring to the table, that is a major red flag.
maybe I am not the ideal candidate then, but if you are looking for someone perfect on paper, your going to get someone who _was_ perfect on paper
If the hiring manager asked about a short gap, that would be a bit wtf to me.
I mean to say if a recruiter asks me about a gap in my resume, I would see this as a red flag. The length of the gap is almost arbitrary. If I sat at home for 2 years straight playing Quake3, but have provable skills (e.g. technical assessment) for the job, the employer should not care what I do on my time. It is MY time.
Even if a candidate passed a strong technical assessment, there are many other factors and skills that make a person a successful team member. A gap is just one of many possible signals that a person might not be a perfect employee. It’s a common sense question to ask for recruiters. They do not need to be explicitly told by their bosses to ask the question and it does not have much to say about the organization. All it takes is to talk to hundreds of candidates for various roles and see how inconsistent the candidates quality is and tie it back to employment history.
The ideal resume is a series of 2 to 5 year stints or promotions within the same company where each role is of increasing responsibility and level. 80th percentile candidates who want to work do not spent long periods of time unemployed. It’s always a matter of someone having major priorities beyond work or an inability to work.
And I say all this as a person who took a year break because I had priorities outside of work, then with awareness of that impact, aggressively jumped back into the workforce at month 12.
Oh good idea. I'll make sure to never hire "former recruiters" now.
Then agree to disagree. I find it offensive that an employer would care what I do in my free time.
I wouldn't want to work for you. :D sorry
You will of course find someone, but its not me.
Because anyone who is incapable of creating plausible lie about their employment is too naive to survive in corporate America.
The best people take career breaks as a flex. They don't need recruiters, they have the executive suites personal number.
The competent know how to mock employment without being employed. Board member, consultant, contractor, infinite unpaid-leave.....there are many such instruments.
The desperate are too desperate to take a break. That leaves the incompetent, the red flags and those of us with truth-itis.
To answer your question: Yes, Truth-itis is worst affliction a mere mortal can have. It doesn't matter that you aren't lying. Because you are anonymous (not famous), your word, along with all others will be put into the 'liar until proven otherwise' category. Get wise to it.
This really isn't talked about enough. Many of us are more principled than our capabilities will allow. Leads to horrible disillusionment later.
This hyper-optimization people have to go through now to beat the resume screening algorithms is dehumanizing as it leaves no opportunity for people to explain their individual life choices. I understand why it is the way it is, but I don't like it and it's not getting any better.
Do we want to turn job seeking into a contest of resume designers? Do we have a feedback from the employers who are supposedly interested in best employees, not the best to pass interviews?
I like to also make merch and take video interviews while wearing say a branded shirt to show I was serious (I was not, it cost $20). I’m also not afraid to offer a screen share and walk through infrastructure diagrams or other intriguing IP to show something I have been working on instead of publishing everything to GitHub (unless it’s an OSS project)
Mind you this has backfired on me. I took an interview with a series A startup and the ceo flat out rejected me upon hearing my startup. He wished me best luck but stated he needed someone who was 100% invested in his startup and not someone thinking about their side hustle. Couldn’t fault him on that and instead flipped the interview into a Q&A with a billionaire. YMMV
Whenever I try going back in the job market, I somehow seem to be "over-qualified". They don't want someone who can do anything needed or who is able to manage on their own, they want someone who does one thing and well. They want someone that is most likely to "need" the job forever, without posing any danger to the leadership positions.
Your idea is interesting but might be more elaborate than you even need.
What's weird is that most employers reject the application after going through all the interview phases successfully, without mentioning any reason, but it's pretty obvious that once the "upper man" has to give the ok, they are not fine with someone who has/had their own side-projects.
I did start my own company, originally to honestly make my own mobile games. A spent a year experimenting with all sorts of stuff, and then just started freelancing for others, and was a lot more successful at that. I probably still have some half-finished attempts at mobile games somewhere.
I took five years off, was statistically underpaid (read: I had peers that made a jump, making double my base salary) when I was previously employed, and every retirement calculator I can find says I still will have more money than I'll need to retire at 45 or 50.
>[E]mployers would rather call back someone with no relevant experience who’s only been out of work for a few months than someone with lots of relevant experience who’s been out of work for longer than six months.
It didn't seem to be a big deal for me when I started looking for work in a new country after being out of the job market for 14 months due to passport issues. But that could be that I was keenly aware of just how bad that looked, and took steps to ameliorate it.
A: a job that ended so ignobly that you don't even want to acknowledge it existed
B: you spent a long time out of the game and weren't getting experience etc during that time
C: something prevented you from working/being a good candidate
A gap is not the death knell it used to be, especially one in the past. That said, it's still nice to offer a vague reason - homemaking or health problems or something. So long as it's clear you didn't spend 3 years selling drugs and playing video games an employer probably won't care.
I get your point, but it's hilarious to see these two on equal footing as "things employers would reject you for"
If you sell habit forming drugs that improve corporate earnings (caffeine, methylphenidate) it’s not called selling drugs anymore. It’s labeled pharmaceuticals or consumer staples / discretionary.
If you’re generating free cash flow making games then suits perk up. The presence of money can nullify a lot of stigma or counterculture friction.
C.R.E.A.M.
So, yeah, if you are taking on someone who has been out of the workforce for a long time, you take on lots of risk. But once they are back in the workforce and getting good referrals, the gap shouldn't matter as much.
(And seeing it first hand: if you are having mental health problems, staying home and playing video games for 5 years will NOT make it better).
I had a year off between jobs. Most people didn't bring up the gap or care that I talked to.
Only one person did bring it up, it was a underpaying job and clearly not a fit.
Most people couldn't even read my resume close enough to know I hadn't worked for months.
Ive been meaning to wrote about my time off, maybe I should get to it.
People rarely ask; when they do, I have some good stories to share, and I think the experiences make me more, not less, interesting.
Having no good explanation for a 5 year gap will probably get you filtered out.
A coworker just came back from 10 weeks of paternity leave today. He mentioned it felt like he had to 'remember how to code again'.
By that logic, the company should fire him because it's going to take him a while to 'get back into the game' of the daily work grind, right?
But it's not going to be that bad, and we don't have anything so pressing he couldn't take even a few weeks to "get back in the groove" for all that matters for our department. We somehow managed fine without him for 10 weeks, he can take his time to get back into the swing of things.
And even if we did have pressing things, that's more on the company and not him. Probably means they should be hiring more than just that one person, and should have hired earlier so they have the chance to get used to things (there's always a ramp up of learning for every job anyway, for pretty much everyone).
Not accusing you of thinking that way, btw, you did say specifically that recruiters might think that, just challenging the thought process of those recruiters.