Employment Gaps

This past week I was out for lunch with a friend where we were talking about job searching and the aftermath of an unplanned job loss. One of the topics we discussed was the “resume gap”. My entire working life, and even before while I was in school, I was warned about the detrimental effects of having a gap of unemployment on a resume. In our discussion, she mentioned that she found out that the magic number of months is three months. Three months is not a very long time.

So, let’s consider this magic duration of three months. Why is it three months? Particularly in this day and age? What about a woman who is on maternity leave? That is greater than three months, usually. Even a man who takes parental leave, for various personal reasons, can be out longer than three months.

This is one place to start, but let’s expand upon this a little more. When I look at the companies that have hired me over the years, I count the weeks from the initial interview to the first day of work. For one company, I did the initial interview in April, did not get an offer until the end of August, and started work in October. I had a sequence of interviews that led to that position. Another company that I interviewed with had the interview at the end of March, but because they had specific intake times, I did not start that position until June. So, in these instances, the first one had a gap of 6 months, just for their selection process, and the second one had a gap of 2.5 months. That is just for the interview process, this does not account for the submission of the job application.

Now, there are some companies that hire more quickly. The quickest one that I experienced had me working within 3-4 weeks. In that case, I happened to have the right connections to help speed up the hiring process.

So, back to the three months as being the baseline for the acceptable timeframe for the gap. Three months seems to be pretty arbitrary, and not really based on anything that makes sense. When working in senior roles in your profession, the interview and vetting processes can be even more lengthy. But what about anyone who needs to step away to deal with other aspects of their life?

This is where I start to feel that this employment gap fallacy is an arbitrary construct that allows companies to disqualify people for random reasons. I do not see how adhering to the”unsuitability” of an employment gap is in line with the current push for greater diversity and inclusivity in the workplace.

A resume is a very one-dimensional view of a person. It removes the human element and distils a life full of varied experiences into bullet points typed in black and white on two pieces of paper. Then, a group of people, along with a computer database filter, make judgements and decisions based on those bullet points. It is a cold, calculating process.

For a moment, let’s take a different angle on this employment gap. Everyone is scared of it. We have all been taught to be scared of it. We have been taught to negatively judge anyone who has one on their resume, and so we instinctively feel a little judgy when we see it on someone else’s resume. It is a learned unconscious bias. My question is why? Why is an employment gap such a concern (other than someone else’s judgy-ness and a database filter)? Why is a gap problematic? Why is it undesirable? Why does this social construct still exist?

I decided to see if I could find anything regarding this. A general internet search just turned up a ton of articles on how to address an employment gap. I had to do some digging to find out what the basis of the negative connotation was. And I managed to find a couple of peer reviewed academic articles. And so, this is what I found in one article. It cited two main reasons:

• “The perceived loss of skills is one reason.” (Oberholzer-Gee, 2008)

• The second one is based on a rational herding phenomenon. “Managers say they are reluctant to interview the long-term unemployed because they believe that other recruiters would have hired these candidates if they were productive, an explanation that is consistent with the rational herding hypothesis.” (Oberholzer-Gee, 2008) Essentially, they think the longer the gap, the more likely the person is lazy.

These perceptions really need to be challenged. There is more to a person’s life than work and career. Family obligations, health concerns, non-traditional and unstructured learning opportunities, travel, projects such as building a home, volunteering, etc. are all activities that fill a person’s life. These are all activities that promote personal growth and are activities that happen in a gap. “Given that employers have rigid expectations for employees to dedicate themselves fully to work, violating these ideal worker norms by demonstrating a prioritization of family evokes a moral evaluation of applicants’ work-family choices. Potential employers perceive opting out as indicating lower dedication to work and, as a result, view opt out applicants as less worthy of a job.” (Weisshar, 2018)

How do these perceptions influence hiring diverse individuals? Most of the men that I know usually have a buddy that they golf with or play hockey, or some other such activity. They help each other out and the guy grabs a new job rather quickly.

But, what happens when you are not part of those social networks? Job hunting becomes a very different activity. The job search takes longer. The gap increases. 

Do the “gap” perceptions account for the fact that as a woman in a traditionally man’s profession, the relationships are vastly different. Our hockey teams are not stacked with senior managers with hiring authority and influence. Our hockey teams are full of mothers and women with considerable household responsibilities. Unless one has a husband who can help her teammate out, the disadvantage is significant.

What about the gentleman who grew up in west Africa and has no idea how to skate? He does not have the support of his teammates on his hockey team either, for he does not play hockey.

The stigma of the unemployment gap needs to die. It is archaic. It does not address the humanness of life. It does more to ensure that employment barriers remain firmly fixed than to ensure fair assessment of a human’s potential to contribute to an organization.

References:

Oberholzer-Gee, Felix. (Jan 2008) “Nonemployment stigma as rational herding: A field experiment”. Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organization.

Weisshaar, K. (2018). From opt out to blocked out: the challenges for labor market re-entry after family-related employment lapses. American Sociological Review, 83(1), 34-60. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122417752355