Article: Make the most of your employment gaps

This article from Career Rocketeer provides very good advice about how to best present any employment breaks in your job history, as well as how to make the most use of your time between jobs.

I do disagree, however, with the recommendation of using a skills-based resume to cover up time gaps. No one is fooled by this - better to include what you were doing during that time if at all applicable - eg: creative work, internships, volunteerism, education, travel. Hiring managers prefer linear presentations, so they don't have to work too hard to reconstruct your job history.

Check out this very helpful article here:
Enhancing your employability despite those employment gaps

Tips for Job Hoppers

EILENE ZIMMERMAN recently wrote a very useful Q&A on “How to Overcome a Job-Hopping History” (NYT), reviewing how to handle job-hopping on your resume and on your interview. When I am doing resume review, the most common mistake I see about job-hopping is either downplaying legitimate work or getting defensive about time off.



Here are some tips I’d add:

DO clearly indicate on your resume if a job is Freelance. One of the #1 resume mistakes I see is mixing fulltime and freelance/consulting work on their resume without indicating which is which. I do like a sequential resume, but if I see 3 employers in 1 year it raises my eyebrows. Are you a job-hopper or a successful consultant? Make sure your resume says this at a glance without needing to have a conversation about it.

DO add pro-bono work, volunteer work, consulting, writing articles, or creative projects. Took a year off work because you joined the Peace Corps? Put it in. You were job searching for 6 months but during that time you were in an arts colony? Ditto. I’d rather know someone was making valuable use of their time even if it isn’t 100% relevant to the current job. It may be an icebreaker with that hiring manager who always wanted to go to Yaddo.