Returning to Work: Why Gaps in Your Resume Are the New Normal

A gap in a professional resume usually stands out strongly for all the wrong reasons. Most people with one seek out help and advice on how best to deal with it, with a view to still coming across as a serious contender to hiring teams. Today, an experienced professional returning to work after a gap means far less than it once did. In many ways, that gap is being filled for you by the facts on the ground and the basic needs of business.

Here we’ll look at why that is — and what you can do to help.

Job Hoppers and Resume Evolution

While you worry about the gap in your resume, employers across industries are worrying about The Great Resignation. And they have good reason. Even before the seismic changes that hit the world over the last two years, the term “job-hopping” had been coined.

There are many theories about how job-hopping became a phenomenon, with many opting to blame the main practitioners, millennials, for being spoiled, entitled and selfish people.

Let’s look again.

In days gone by, employers wanted excellence—to varying degrees—but started to demand “flexibility”. Flexibility was an innocuous ask at first—a guard against people with no team-spirit; the “that’s not my job!” type—but it changed over time into a guard against lack of organization, or lack of sufficient employees, putting focused expertise in a bind.

Unfortunately, this often resulted in an environment in which nobody was sure who was supposed to do what—apart from whatever they were hired to do—at any given moment; and in which “private message” manipulation or “pulling-rank” thrived.

This—along with other bad practices—must have resulted in younger members of the workforce feeling disengaged. And, since short-lived jobs had become a good thing in the eyes of employers seeking candidates with “multiple experiences”, why stick around? They knew they could “roll up their sleeves and pitch in” or “be scrappy!” elsewhere—perhaps in a company that offered more. Or was more.

And who can blame them for seeing things that way?

Resumes that would once have been rejected—in favor of resumes showing less jobs over more years—became desirable, then the norm. Two years ago, a candidate with a resume showing only a couple of jobs over many years would raise eyebrows.

How do we know this seemingly dependable professional is flexible?

By the time the expensive issue of retention had started kicking too hard to be ignored, it was too late. Everybody had adapted. “Job satisfaction” had become a token phrase for the always flexible disengaged. And the more often team members disappeared, to be replaced by new people, the less chance anybody had to feel settled.

A vicious and inflexible circle had formed.

Regardless of whether or not you agree, the fact remains that—for better or worse—the only constant is change.

And it’s starting to work in your favor.

The Great Resignation and Resume Evolution

Thanks to the pandemic, we’ve all experienced a gap of one sort or another over the past two years. Whether that has affected our resumes by creating employment gaps isn’t particularly relevant. Nobody would be surprised to see gaps during that period, or consider it a negative.

Gaps are the new normal.

If the gaps are further in the past, then they’re essentially of no relevance. But there’s a lot more to gaps/recent unemployment than just a perception based on societal upheaval. That gap in your resume is, even as you read this, being filled by data, cold facts, and hard realities, being adapted to by those who value the bottom line.

Basically, it goes like this.

Once the pandemic hit, job-hopping quickly became The Great Resignation. Hiring is up among industries, with a net employment gain of 6.4 million from February last year to February this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On the other hand, the number of people quitting their jobs—not being laid off or fired—remained steady in February at 4.4 million.

This makes employee retention a serious issue.

And with younger employees far more likely to quit their jobs, seasoned professionals are becoming all the rage. Suddenly, words like loyal and dependable stand out more than the word flexible.

To get an idea of just how important retention has become for employers and hiring teams, consider this: Salaries among recruiters, adjusted for inflation, had jumped 14% by the end of 2021, according to Revelio Labs. Human Resource experts are even calling for recruiter roles to be elevated up the hierarchy to “talent advisor”— so they have the ability to say “No” without fear. 

“Valued talent acquisition professionals can’t be shy about asking hiring managers to reassess what they’re looking for.”
– Jeremy Eskenazi, SHRM-SCP, managing principal, Riviera Advisors.

This means that there’s a problem so big it requires even iron-clad organizational hierarchies to be readdressed, so that experts with their feet on the ground can be heard, rather than handed down orders. This doesn’t happen lightly and will probably see pushback from those on the way to becoming dinosaurs.

For you it means something specific. It means that people are looking for real answers. And those answers come in the form of data:

“Adults younger than 30 are far more likely than older adults to have voluntarily left their job last year: 37% of young adults say they did this, compared with 17% of those aged 30-49, 9% of those aged 50-64 and 5% of those aged 65 and older.”
– Pew Research Center, 2022.

Low pay was also cited—so young, cheap labor, is no longer the easy answer, while seasoned professionals are.

The gap is closing because there’s a more important gap to fill.

Gaps in resumes are abundant today. This is partly because many older, experienced professionals went into forced retirement during the pandemic. Many will return, if the incentives are right. And if companies—as is usually their way—plan to throw money at the problem, then throwing it in the direction of reliable, experienced experts makes sense, according to the data.

Whether or not you have stayed up-to-date with your industry and/or specialty, have brushed up your tech skills and so on, is another matter and very important.

Gaps and the Evolution of Flexibility

In an effort to deal with the retention issue, employers are no longer demanding flexibility of their workers. Now they’re more concerned with offering it. Flexible working arrangements, flexible hours, flexible… what would you like to be flexible?

“You’d like me to be flexible about that gap in your resume? No problem!”

Seasoned experts are the solution to The Great Resignation. The very employers who forced gaps into resumes, by forcing early retirements, will be only too glad to ignore them once they realize how valuable those people are.

And they’re starting to realize just that.

However, there is a serious—and bizarre—outlier in the form of Big Tech. If your experience and specialty is in that area, read the linked article, brush up on your skills and follow the advice below.

If not, don’t get cocky. You’re supposed to be professional and reliable, remember? Let’s have a look at a professional approach to dealing with this “issue”:

In a conversation:

• Don’t bother mentioning it if you’ve worked since.
• Be honest and always concise about your reason.
• Mention personal studies, voluntary work or other good stuff.
• Indicate that the result was a strong desire to get back to work.

In a resume:

Summarize into one optimistic, positive line of text:

• Stay-at-home parent, for a family of four, energized to return to work. 2013- 2022

Cover a time of travel:

• Fortunate to travel 13 countries before returning to focus on career. 2017 – 2022

Deal with any unwanted employment gap:

• Returning to work after a period of personal exploration and growth. 2018 – 2022

Or the pandemic:

• Took voluntary retirement due to pandemic-related issues. 2020 – 2022

Gap over. Get back to work!