"Because I didn't need to". Holy shit, I can't take how out of touch people are with tech comp, living within your means, and not living to work. I need to just stop reading this thread.
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.
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.
I had a baby, but in reviewing its resume realized it had a 9 month gap of doing nothing. I asked that recruiter what policy was, realized my mistake for bringing him onto the team, and fired jr the next day. Strangely morale plummeted.
It's amazing the baby even came to term. Without results by the end of the quarter, I'd have expected Mom to have been taken out back and shot. Weird how the company is struggling to make progress, despite the high bar for performance.
Why is it important that someone was never homeless?
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?
I worked at a company that at one point was actually open minded and cared more about the work than a lot of trivialities (till it grew up, got acquired by private equity, and became an empire of bullshit), and there was an employee who was famously homeless until she worked there. She was intelligent and incredibly dedicated and really well liked throughout, but I was also told she needed to be told to shower regularly (no idea whether that's true; she never seemed too unkempt to me). She could certainly also be called a bit weird.
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.
It’s just a possible signal. When you have 30 equally qualified candidates, you will take any signal you can get.
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.
> If you are too rich, then we might as well be paying you Monopoly money
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.
Yes, this is absolutely interrelated. Cognitive decline is not a real issue before typical retirement age. I suspect the following : Younger, less experienced managers being uncomfortable managing older more experienced workers. Life experience means older workers are less likely to put up with abuse, can recognize toxic situations, and have the personal skills to make proactive changes. Busier, fuller lives, and having already been burned out a few times means they won’t overwork themselves. And financial independence means they can stand up to bad situations and that getting fired is a speed bump, not an earthquake.
Managerial class needs to strip away any responsibility so they are perfectionist.
If we sill lived in an entrepreneurial society this whole thing would not be a big issue
I've never been a hiring manager but I've interviewed maybe a couple dozen engineers over the years, of all experience levels. I've never once considered an employment gap in and of itself a deal breaker. Sometimes I've never even asked about it. And the times it did come up, there was never a concerning explanation.
But many people are not like me and they think any stumble in the rat race is an insurmountable red flag.
Were you interviewing applicants directly, or was there an upstream selection process before their names landed on your desk? It makes sense that everyone you see with a resume gap has a good reason behind it if recruiters were filtering out the people who don't.
I'm not usually the one that first sees resumes. It is true I have the luxury of seeing pre-screened candidates. I don't know what the filter criteria are but I've seen candidates with worse things than employment gaps. I mostly put that down to the recruiter or whoever is screening the resumes not totally understanding the position that we're trying to fill.
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.
Did you filter through the giant pile of raw resumes? If they were pre-filtered then you already were talking to qualified candidates and a determination was made that the gap was not indicative of bigger issues with that candidate.
If you are interviewing less than a dozen candidates a year then that probably means someone else in the organisation has already gone through a big pile of CVs to narrow it down to the 10-15 best candidates for you to interview. Having, briefly, sat at the start of that pipeline and seen 150+ reasonably relevant looking CVs (someone had already thrown out the very worst ones) roll in in a week for a fairly entry level programming position and having only a few hours spend to go from 150 to 10-15 candidates, you start making up some pretty arbitrary rules for throwing out CVs.
Not hiring tech workers because they're not financially desperate enough sure would explain why "tech hiring is hard". Jesus Christ. Thanks for the reminder that I should have no loyalty to an employer whatsoever and treat them as an adversary.
Yup, and age discrimination is rampant as well. I’d say 50 is where it starts being a serious drag on an IC candidate. People use terms like “fit” and “team dynamics.”
"culture fit" is what I've heard, but "fit" is good to watch out for too, so good to know, as is "team dynamics" which I had not come across before (in this context).
"team spirit" and ”teamwork" are other terms to watch out for, when used in the wrong contexts, as expressions of factors that might be beyond your control.
I have a gap on my resume, I went thru-hiking, sure that is a good enough and maybe positive explanation, but if brought up on an interview I'm going to pass on any offer unless I'm desperate.
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
It’s most likely to be brought up by a recruiter during a 10 minute phone screen, and since a tru-hike takes maybe 6 months max, I wouldn’t expect you to get asked. If you went hiking for over a year, I think the recruiter might ask, but that it doesn’t really reflect on the company’s values, it’s just a standard kind of question any recruiter might ask if they get a sense there could be a problem there.
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.
>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.
Oh good idea. I'll make sure to never hire "former recruiters" now.
Maybe you were working somewhere, but you you don't want to talk about it. A competitor, something under the table, somewhere you were fired from and don't want anyone to follow up...
To think we punish our fellow man for pursuing all life has to offer, especially over a career spanning decades is a travesty. If I'm hiring, I don't favor someone who's never once broke away from the matrix of 9-5 employment year after year to explore something new or meaningful or to rest.
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.
This is a negative sum game - to stand out, I embellish my resume, so now you have to do the same and we're back on square 1 but the efforts are spent.
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?
Because hiring practice is outdated. Previously, it largely discriminate against women who decided to have babies. Now, it's going against everyone who decided to take a break.
This used to be the case. So many people have gaps attributed to "consulting" that the feedback from recruiters is now something like, "well since you've been independent so long, how do we know you can work well with others?" eyeroll
When I lost my job, I took some time for myself then immediately put up a landing page for a new idea. Then iterated on said landing page until it was a full marketing website for the idea. Everything else can be hidden behind a robots.txt or require signup for demo etc. having a marketing page that evolved over time allows recruiters to pop the website into archive.org and see your company evolving. Just saying you had a business is no longer sufficient.
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
I've just worked on personal projects, not always even releasing them (because they tend not to be small projects), and put it as freelance development work in my resume for any gaps (it's true, I did work on those things). I don't think I've been asked about that once. Never been an issue as far as I know (maybe it pre-screened me out from a few places).
Your idea is interesting but might be more elaborate than you even need.
I have the same issue, but in my case it's one (or more) start-ups/projects that have been going for years.
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.
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.
I did this, my own LLC since 2017, but now the concern is different: "we need someone with 100% dedication the job", "how much time will you spend on your business", "you haven't worked in a team for years", "you don't need the money", etc...
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 started to notice gaps after a year as a mild signal. A gap of 5 years was a strong signal and nearly every candidate I talked with had some level of hireability issue beyond the gap. Even a mother that decided to stay home till her kids were in school was going to have a difficult re-entry to the rigid expectations of the working world. After someone had be back in the workforce for a year or two and had some mildly plausible explanation for their 5 year gap, I stopped noting it as a downside. But experience older than about 12 years was often not factored in, so a person with a recent 5 year gap will just have less recent and relevant experience than someone who had worked 12/12 previous years.
My brother in law had something like a 5 year gap. He had a mental breakdown and went on disability. He's doing great now, but that first boss he had after coming back to work was a saint, putting up with so much emotional baggage and spent personal time coaching him out of giving up.
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).
Your brother in law’s situation is quite common. It’s exactly why this is a reliable signal on a resume to avoid or at least not be in the dark on candidates with baggage. There are very few saintly bosses out there ready to rehabilitate someone’s work ego and professionalism. As a recruiter, it was my job to find the warts on an otherwise excellent candidate so that the hiring manager could at least make an informed decision. Missing something big with a candidate reflected poorly on my attention to detail.
Employers need worker bees to keep delivering widgets or widget service. Any deviation from the happy path is highly suspicious.
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.
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.
I think it might be because recruiters will think you've been getting used to doing just your hobbies for the time that you had a gap that it'll take you a while to "get back into the game" of the daily work grind.
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.
Because when you work at a company, you are a human resource, and when that resource's growth cannot be measured in a standard quantifiable way, it is considered a risk.
Are they? I have taken two full-year sabbaticals over the course of my thirty-year career, and this has yet to pose a problem when looking for a new job.
People rarely ask; when they do, I have some good stories to share, and I think the experiences make me more, not less, interesting.
It’s not holding you back because you are jumping over the low bar. A year is not a particularly long gap and might even go unnoticed. But f someone noticed and asked, sounds like you had a great answer. That’s all you need.
Having no good explanation for a 5 year gap will probably get you filtered out.
>[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.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadI 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
And yes, the right amount of financial dependence keeps the average employee in the seat and taking the work seriously.
Gracias :)
#parsing_pun
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
>[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.