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Previous recruiter here. 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 wo

Previous recruiter here. 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.

thejazzman 3y ago
Wow... do you mind sharing which company(ies) this is commonplace?
- dougmwne 3y ago
  Almost all of them and in every industry. It is as standard in HR as having a PTO policy.
admissionsguy 3y ago
That's what unvarnished truth sounds like.
hotpotamus 3y ago
And for some reason it's a mystery why people are having few or no kids these days.
- iosguyryan 3y ago
  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.
  - FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
    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.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    Just make sure and get him into a competitive preschool since I'm sure recruiters will be looking at that by the time he's applying for a job.
latexr 3y ago
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?
- toldyouso2022 3y ago
  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
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  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.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  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.
chrsw 3y ago
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.
- SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
  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.
  - chrsw 3y ago
    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.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  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.
- dagw 3y ago
  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.
k8svet 3y ago
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.
- dougmwne 3y ago
  You should not be loyal to an employer unless they are extremely special (and probably privately controlled). And yes, the right amount of financial dependence keeps the average employee in the seat and taking the work seriously.
whateveracct 3y ago
Good to know the industry does its best to discriminate against the disadvantaged while maintaining plausible deniability :)
- dougmwne 3y ago
  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.”
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    "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). Gracias :)
    - fuzztester 3y ago
      "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. #parsing_pun
- Zpalmtree 3y ago
  you should hire people who are worse candidates because.... they're disadvantaged!
  - whateveracct 3y ago
    Not saying that, but some of those reasons for passing on a candidate are straight-up illegal.
    - dougmwne 3y ago
      Illegal if you do it explicitly. Legal if you do it by proxy criteria and plausible deniability.
living_room_pc 3y ago
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
- dougmwne 3y ago
  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.
  - living_room_pc 3y ago
    I think you're over thinking this. 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.
    - dougmwne 3y ago
      As a former recruiter, I very much disagree:) 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.

thejazzman 3y ago

Wow... do you mind sharing which company(ies) this is commonplace?

dougmwne 3y ago
Almost all of them and in every industry. It is as standard in HR as having a PTO policy.

admissionsguy 3y ago

That's what unvarnished truth sounds like.

hotpotamus 3y ago

And for some reason it's a mystery why people are having few or no kids these days.

iosguyryan 3y ago
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.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  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.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  Just make sure and get him into a competitive preschool since I'm sure recruiters will be looking at that by the time he's applying for a job.

latexr 3y ago

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?

toldyouso2022 3y ago
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
hotpotamus 3y ago
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.
dougmwne 3y ago
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.

chrsw 3y ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest 3y ago
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.
- chrsw 3y ago
  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.
dougmwne 3y ago
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.
dagw 3y ago
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.

k8svet 3y ago

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.

dougmwne 3y ago
You should not be loyal to an employer unless they are extremely special (and probably privately controlled). And yes, the right amount of financial dependence keeps the average employee in the seat and taking the work seriously.

whateveracct 3y ago

Good to know the industry does its best to discriminate against the disadvantaged while maintaining plausible deniability :)

dougmwne 3y ago
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.”
- fuzztester 3y ago
  "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). Gracias :)
  - fuzztester 3y ago
    "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. #parsing_pun
Zpalmtree 3y ago
you should hire people who are worse candidates because.... they're disadvantaged!
- whateveracct 3y ago
  Not saying that, but some of those reasons for passing on a candidate are straight-up illegal.
  - dougmwne 3y ago
    Illegal if you do it explicitly. Legal if you do it by proxy criteria and plausible deniability.

living_room_pc 3y ago

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

dougmwne 3y ago
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.
- living_room_pc 3y ago
  I think you're over thinking this. 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.
  - dougmwne 3y ago
    As a former recruiter, I very much disagree:) 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.