The issue is earlier in the resume screening process, before they’re talking to you at all. If a company receives 200 applications and 50 of them have flawless

The issue is earlier in the resume screening process, before they’re talking to you at all. If a company receives 200 applications and 50 of them have flawless resumes, even something as small as a couple unexplained gaps could be enough to move you below the cutoff for getting a call back. I think the thing that confuses people about gaps is that it doesn’t make it impossible to get any job. It just raises questions for interviewers who have a lot of resumes to sort through. If you’ve only ever applied to jobs in less competitive markets or times, it may not have mattered at all yet. There are actually a lot of small hiring quirks that an entire generation of engineers hasn’t encountered yet because we’ve been in a decade long bull run.