Hey, Job Seeker! Are You Struggling To Explain Gaps In Your Work History?

The humble resume is more than a job-finding tool - it’s a window into your personality, your professional journey, and your purpose. Think of a resume like a menu in a restaurant - it’s something to whet the professional appetite, but the meal is yet to come!

Careers are not linear. Your journey to your current role/position is truly unique: which means that no one resume looks the same. Gaps can, and often do, come up in someone’s resume. This is absolutely not something to worry about, contrary to popular belief - bad hiring managers and poor HR heads will have you believe gaps are a sign of weakness or lack of commitment. We counter this completely. 

We think gaps are simply signifiers of personal and professional change, be it planned or unplanned, positive or negative. 

Consider the last 2 years. In our post-COVID present, would anyone think it fair if a hiring manager criticizes why a senior business candidate lost their job amidst the biggest crisis in a generation? Absolutely not. 

Consider this: would it be fair for a business owner to critique a mother, who took time away from their career to raise a family, and is now rejoining the workforce with a gap in her resume? Of course not!

Finding the confidence to communicate gaps in your resume is difficult, but rather than looking at them as career hiccups, they are far from it - they are simply another tale to tell your hiring manager on your road to your next job.

Our advice is to strategize how to communicate the gaps in your resume. 

Remember: everyone has a story, so to ignore gaps or, worse yet, to lie about them is a sure-fire way of discounting yourself for the running of any job. References will be sought, and your career story corroborated, so we advise meeting it head-on and using any gaps in your resume to illuminate your journey to where you are today.

There are 3 key things to remember when considering how best to communicate gaps in your resume - honesty, reference corroboration, and telling your story!

Be honest

First and foremost you need to be honest and forthright about any gaps in your resume. Our advice is to never forget your resume is setting a professional context for your potential employer. They don’t know your drivers, your passions, your life story, your family set up, or a particular career plan...yet. They only have your resume. So, whatever gaps you have, explain them. Set a firm context of who you are, where you’ve been, how you’ve approached your career to date, and, yes, why there are gaps in your resume. 

Again, refer to the example above - the pandemic upended millions of careers, forced thousands of companies to close, force parents to work and homeschool, put incredible amounts of pressure on the healthcare, logistics, tech, and public sectors to keep us all fed, healthy and (where possible) provided with a supplementary income or furlough.

But there are myriad other reasons why people take time away from work, too, and almost all of them are legitimate; parental responsibilities; caring for elderly relatives; redundancy; illness; injury; mental health leave; bereavement leave; industry issues (see examples); being put on gardening leave; taking a sabbatical, or simply seeking a new opportunity and taking extended time away from work to reconsider a new opportunity. 

Not one of the above reasons is a reason not to hire someone. But you need to prioritize communication and honesty above all else, to provide your next employer with all the information for them to make a qualified call on your ability to do their job. Otherwise, a gap is just a gap.

Seek references

If in doubt, seek references! A reference can provide “bookends” to your period of leave away from work. 

Let’s use an example: taking extended leave for your mental health. Despite mental health support and improvements to structures of in-work care being a much-discussed and widely supported endeavor, and most employers are empathetic to a tee, there are ways of objectively referencing periods of leave that can then qualify your periods away from work. 

Your old employer can include in any reference they give an objective and fair-minded reason for any extended period of leave, especially with your sign-off and contextual reasoning. This, then, tells a story - of why you have a gap in your resume, how your past employer supported you, of recovery (in this instance), and what’s led you to rejoin the workforce. 

But again refer to the many reasons why people take leave of work: use a reference to qualify the reasons and use them to bookend your career movements.

Tell your story

Above all else, be true to yourself. Tell your story. No one else will tell it, and during the interview process especially it’s your one opportunity to set the tone of who you are and why you will provide value to your new employer. 

Part of doing that is explaining every bump in the road and success in equal measure and also talking openly about any gaps in your resume. Doing so provides a candor between you and your employer and opens the door to other exciting conversations, such as how you see your career advancing now, what your priorities are because of the time spent away from work, and how you feel you’re a better and more productive worker as a result.