4 ms·

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 emp

by 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.

by chrsw 3y ago

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.