One thorny issue that has probably troubled job seekers for as long as there have been jobs is job gaps. What do you do when you haven’t worked for five years but need to work again, or couldn’t find work for a year or two during tough economic times? In the modern day, with the importance of the resume, this issue is even more difficult, as you have to get around job gaps in paper without explaining to someone in person (at least until you get an interview). However, there are some easy ways to address job gaps on a resume.
Use Months Instead of Years
For smaller job gaps (less than a year), the simplest solution is to remove months from your positions and go with just years. While recruiters and hiring managers do prefer to see months, it’s certainly a common enough practice to have years alone, especially for long-time employees. Basically, if you didn’t work from June 2022 to November 2022 but have worked before and since, you can have your current job as 2022 – Present and previous role as 2019 (or whatever the start date was) – 2022. Gap covered! If someone does ask about why there are no months, you should hopefully be able to explain the gap easier over the phone. It’s easy, it’s a standard practice so doesn’t stand out, and it shouldn’t raise too many questions.
Find A Volunteer or Side Gig to Cover It
Another solution to address job gaps is to use some non-full-time or industry-related role to place on the resume to remove any gap. For example, if you didn’t work from 2015 to 2018, but did a lot of volunteering in that time, you can put the name of the organization and then the role you fulfilled (whether it be fundraiser, sales, customer service, or gardening) just like a normal job. If the role was fairly tenuous or you don’t have a ton of content to put, that’s fine, just a single line can do the bare minimum of covering the gap on the resume. In an interview setting you can explain the situation and the nature of the role, but as long as you legitimately did work for the organization in the capacity described on the resume, it’s a great job gap aid.
Write Out an Explanation
If your job gap was over a year and you didn’t have any sort of volunteer, part-time, or gig role to cover the break, things get a little trickier. One solution is to literally write out why you weren’t working or what you were doing (even if it was something personal, such as caring for a sick parent or raising children) in that time. You can put this either in the appropriate gap in the experience on the resume, or at the top of the resume under the summary to highlight it. Simply saying, “Was out of the workforce from 2005 to 2012 to raise a family” is an elegant way of explaining the situation, and something that most employers will understand.
Try to Minimize the Gap with Other Content
Now let’s say it’s a worst-case scenario, and none of the above strategies work well, for whatever reason. There are still other tactics that can work to minimize the job gap. If you have worked since your job break, you can include a lot of content for your roles since then to push the gap down the page, or onto a second page if you have a two-page resume. That will make it less likely to be spotted by employers or recruiters. If you are currently in the job gap and haven’t had experience for a while, and you don’t have anything to cover or easily explain the job gap, you could always try a functional resume, which divides your experience into categories (or functions) such as Sales, Retail, Marketing, etc. and keeps all the employer information at the bottom of the resume. This will also do the trick of moving the job gap further down the document to make it less obviously visible.
These are some of the best strategies for addressing a job gap, but even if you do have one that you don’t feel like you can do much with, it’s ok – plenty of people get hired with job gaps every year. If you’re qualified and interested in roles, you will eventually get the bite you need.