I left my job last year due to a variety of reasons (not ideal industry, parent dealing with cancer in a different country, hadn’t visited long distance friends and relatives in over a decade, etc.) and at the time felt it to be the best thing for me. I still don’t regret it per se, but the timing of my return was somewhat unfortunate (Nov 2022). I started looking actively right around when the layoffs started happening, and the job market started to crash. Now I’ll be coming up on 8 months unemployed, and I’m starting to worry about the effect that might have on recruiters… What advice - if any - do you have to that might help with the story I tell recruiters? I’m hoping most will understand with the current climate and how hard it’s been finding work (even freelance), but I’m still hyper aware of the ever increasing gap in my resume.
Saying family with cancer should be good enough for anyone to stop asking after that. If not, 🚩
I started removing older jobs that aren’t relevant, which looks like gaps. Nobody has ever said a thing.
Sometimes recruiters and interviewers ask about it. Last year a recruiter from Apple and an interviewer from Qualcomm asked me about my gap. In fact Qualcomm interviewer told me to update my resume for future job applications and make it gap free. I thanked him for his valuable suggestion during the interview. However I never made my resume gap free because I found no reasons to waste resume space with unrelated job experience details.
I’ve definitely been asked, it’s never explicitly been held against me, but I just wonder if they’re secretly counting it as a con