A friend recently sent me an invite to her LinkedIn network, a place for business networking and housing an online resume. When I looked at her online profile, she had a gaping hole in her work listing. The time missing was her time at the company we both actually worked at together.
There is a lot of talk about what to do on a resume to deflect hole due to long unemployment. Not much is put into filling holes of employment from employers you would love to forget every existed, but you will settle for a way to leave them off the resume. The former employer I'm talking about offered a barely functional work environment, and my friend did great work while she was there.
I am sure she listed the old job when looking for her current (and much better) job, but now has the power to spirit the experience away. I wonder what she will use as an explanation should she need one, since it looks like a 7-year gap in employment (I suspect she misdated some jobs on her profile).
I left the company at my own choosing, but under duress, as did a flood of others at the same time during a changing of the guard. I still list the company, although my work there was concurrent with my current day-job employer. The experience I gained, the skills I picked up, and being able to use the bad experience of the job as a story of survival, seems to be work the ink. It was apparently not for my friend.
But I need to give you a little useful advice, so let’s get into how you can address a resume gap before it becomes a black hole in your career. Assuming you want to address it.
The first step is to remember to be honest in your explanation, even if you don’t turn out to be perfectly honest. Don’t allow the interviewer to turn a gap in your resume into a major concerns.
Make sure you come up with a good reason for your resume gap (while sticking to that whole honestly step). Some basic reasons include relocation, family emergencies, personal and educational goals, or a medical situation. In the case of a medical situation, be aware that the condition may raise some questions, which may or may not be legal.
Long periods of unexplained unemployment is a red flag for employers. Maybe you don’t need the work and could flake out and leave them high and dry at a critical point, or maybe you aren’t good enough to fool most employers that you are a bad employee, and they don’t want to be the company that falls for your nonsense.
One of the 5 dozen or so ideas I have come up with to offer up as services for Fast Forward business proprieties is to do resume reviews, rewrites, and receiving policies. Since I intend to coach up both the people looking for jobs and the businesses looking to hire them, it seemed like an easy way to make a few bucks for the company while I am still working through the lean early days.
So today, as I was working on a few resumes, and proofreading/tweeking the job seeking interview guide I’m working on, I had a quick flash reminder of the anti-bio exercise I worked up for people like me who have trouble putting down their accomplishments in a CV, resume, or traditional biography.
Then I had another idea. A great new idea for finding what to truly focus on in the New Year. Since most people are using the beginning of 2009, alongside the current economic crisis, as the perfect time to evaluate themselves and current professional skill levels, why not take a slightly more business like approach in the evaluation of your own personal life?
As you take time in the next few days to work on goals, expectations and resolutions, be extremely mindful to take note in exactly where you stand at this moment in your personal life and relationships that aren’t work related. Take inventory of your proficiency levels of communications with your family and friends, your personal fitness, your cooking or cleaning skills…whatever you have on your list to improve upon in the next 365 days. Write yourself a ‘You Resume’ dated for right now, chronicling where you currently stand. And just like your professional information, make sure you set up periodic check times to examine and update your new ‘You Resume.’
This new personal resume of your person may be the perfect way for you to take that long look in the mirror you have be putting off for fear of not liking the results. And if you don’t like the results, you now know exactly what needs to be fixed.
Welcome to my new blog. This is where I will chronicle the next phase of mis-adventures of my life. Thank you for staying on the ride, and for you newcomers to the inside of my mental mania, I will do my best to make sure the trip is both entertaining and educational.
Life In Fast Forward: The Blog is still a bit of a work in progress. Keep checking in for new posts and site updates.
About Blog
This blog supports some of the thoughts and interjections from the folks at Fast Forward Business Properties. Our ideas, things we test, and a few random thoughts will show up here.
Name: J. Cleveland Payne
Home: Little Rock, Arkansas, United States
About Me: News is my profession, so it only fits that I am a news junkie. I'm a radio show/segment producer for a news/talk radio station in Little Rock, Arkansas.
