Fill in those CV (or resume) blanks

Employers are often suspicious of unexplained time on a curriculum vitae (CV) or resume. This is a hangover from days past when people didn’t flit from one job to another.

They expect to see a list of previous employers along with starting and finishing dates. Nobody is likely to get excited about a missing week or two, but if there are one or more unexplained periods of longer than about four weeks alarm bells will ring.

We’ll look at strategies for dealing with blanks in a moment. First let’s look at why they make employers nervous.

I once interviewed someone for a job who had a six-month blank on his CV. It looked pretty solid until that point, but the job after the blank was a clear step down from the earlier positions. There might have been a perfectly reasonable explanation – six months travelling overseas or perhaps a full-time education course not related to career matters. In fact, I discovered the interviewee had been in prison.

This is an extreme case. Hopefully it doesn’t apply to you. The other serious negative possibility is a period of enforced inactivity following dismissal. Sacked people often have difficulty finding another job, particularly in a tight-knit industry. Less negative, but still likely to concern a potential employer is if the blank space was the result of illness. Companies are often unwilling to hire people with medical problems – despite skills shortages.

Blanks on a CV are hardly rare for modern knowledge workers. Nobody has a job for life and being made redundant is a rite of passage in the tech industry. Redundancy is often sudden, so it can take weeks or months to find a new job What’s more, people are often burnt out by struggling companies and need a rest between gigs.

Even without redundancy, knowledge workers are prone to CV blanks by the nature of their work. We tend to move from job to job rarely staying with one company more than two years. The process of moving from one company to another is not always smooth; it’s possible to fall between the gaps. Over the past 20 years I’ve twice started new jobs only to discover within days that I’m in the wrong place. No doubt most readers will have found themselves in a similar position.

Women have extra reasons for career gaps: children. And then there are short-term contracts – jobs that only last for a specified period. It isn’t always easy to finesse a smooth transition from one job to the next.

So, we all have blanks, most are reasonable but employers don’t like them. What’s the best strategy?

The first rule is to turn those blanks into meaningful yet honest CV entries. Leaving unexplained blanks is bad but not being truthful only makes matters worse. Be upfront about any time when you were not in paid work. If it was only a matter of weeks then be ready to say that you ‘took a holiday’ or ‘needed a rest’ or ‘painted the house’ between jobs. That’s often enough explanation. It’s also perfectly OK to tell an employer that you waited for the right opportunity to come along.

If the absence was linked to illness (or childbirth) tell the employer the truth explaining, assuming it’s true, that you are now fully recovered and keen to work to your full potential.

If you spent the time in prison… well that’s a whole different story that we’ll save for another post.