How about a mother with a 10-year gap raising kids?
Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
131–140 of 248 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
#132Just tell the truth. You don't want to work somewhere that doesn't understand basic human stuff.
Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
#133FWIW, in some places, even employment status is a protected category:
https://www.foxrothschild.com/publications/new-york-city-now...
I remember my employer mentioning how questions can no longer ask what the candidate is working on, but can only ask the candidate's experience (no pointers about timeline of such experience).
Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then its not a lie because there is no intention for someone to misinterpret it.
If that were the case you would just say "I took time off due to a medical situation." The only reason to invoke "loved one" here is to mislead.
Your version says “I’m a liability”. My versions says “this person has had some struggle and has their priorities in order”.
Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
#135Often times recruiters are not allowed to probe any further once you bring up a medical issue. The difficulty then becomes, being able to draw upon relevant and timely situations to answer questions in an interview.
Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
#136Those are rookie numbers. 12 months is nothing. Try an 8 year gap - after an initial 3 years experience working as a .NET dev.
I lived below US poverty level for 8 years with a CS degree and did the bare minimum of shitty contract jobs because I didn't want to be coding for someone else... eventually I realized I suck working for myself. (and now I have a normal 6 figure dev job)
The main thing you have to have is a story. I lied and said I enjoyed coding products in SecondLife and made tens of thousands of dollars coding inside a videogame, even though the truth was I only made a couple thousand. I also made my contract work sound more important, and went through the various startup ideas I tried and had a good story on why they failed. As long as story sounds plausible, it seems like you learned things related to the work, and you seem like a good person someone will give a shot as contract-to-hire even with an 8 year gap. So I think a one year gap won't be a problem at all, you shouldn't even need to do contract-to-hire.
Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
#137I can't speak for every company out there, but for us, we've discovered that resumes and whiteboard challenges are bad predictors of great engineers. So, we simply come up with a small project that's related to what we would have you work on if you were hired and give you around a week to finish it. You can use other people's code snippets online as well as any libraries you see fit. As long as the end result is good…
Out of consideration for people applying for the job you should seriously consider doing the culture fit first. It's not right to have someone do a weeklong project well when you could have got to a no by a 20m phone call.
Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that were the case you would just say "I took time off due to a medical situation." The only reason to invoke "loved one" here is to mislead.
Your version says “I’m a liability”. My versions says “this person has had some struggle and has their priorities in order”.
We know it sounds better - that’s not in question. The point is that it’s less honest.
Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
#139When returning to the workplace, the issue quickly turns to references.
Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?
#140I had a 5 years gap in my career - all medical. Recently, right after that gap, I was intervieweing with multiple companies - most of them didn't even ask me, even though I was worried as hell. In the end I got almost all job offers I wanted. The only notable exception that didn't even grant me a phone screen was Amazon, their recruiter told me that ML has advanced so much in those 5 years that all my prior experienc…
What I learned in my career so far is that all these things that supposedly harm your resume are actually good things; they serve as a filter for exploitative and undesirable companies.
For example, I bet the real reason why Amazon didn't hire you is because they want to hire people who are afraid to take any time off; people who don't have a personal life. They want people who they can fully control.
The requirements of a company says a lot about the company. Having a 'bad' history can actually help you in finding the right job for you. For example, I'm pretty sure that if you put in your resume something like "I want to get paid a lot for minimal effort because I'm lazy" and you distribute a few thousand copies of your resume, you will get responses and you will find what you asked for.
The worse your history is, the fewer responses you will get; you can easily mitigate that problem by scaling up the number of resumes you send. You have to be prepared to move cities and/or countries though.
IMO, if 10% of applications result in an interview offer, you're not doing your job search correctly. You need to design your resume and your strategy so that you only get less than 1% response rate.
Gaps in your resume are useful in filtering out undesirable companies. Also, changing companies often is also good for filtering out undesirable companies. You want to work for companies who think they're special ("not gonna happen to us" type of thinking), then after you start working for such company, they're more likely to give you a raise when you ask for one because once inside, your history of quitting gives you leverage; they know what will happen if they don't give you a raise.