Addressing Gaps in Your Resume

Career gaps can happen; knowing how to discuss them prevents them from being misunderstood by the recruiter and allows you to highlight your analytical and interpersonal skills.
 

Read also: Lying on your resume...? Bad idea!

1. Acknowledge
Some situations, not endured (raising children, sabbatical year...), are fully acknowledged. Others refer to complex or painful experiences and the candidate may be tempted to twist reality in their favor. Furthermore, a bad choice, a mistake, are easily explained, but their repetition is a sign that the person has not learned. It's time to try to understand why you keep repeating them.

It is important to discuss your experience without guilt; if you rely on lies or evasion, it's very shaky, the recruiter feels it immediately and the candidate, unless they are an experienced actor in this field, is never good.

2. Highlight
Any experience, even a failure, is highlight-able. Any difficult experience, positively framed is valuable. For your experience to resonate positively with the recruiter, you must be able to formulate things positively. You don't prepare your presentation of facts and arguments in a hurry. It's by reflecting on this experience to highlight what was useful. When you manage to talk about it without discomfort, you demonstrate maturity and self-confidence, you turn a failure, an accident, a mistake to your advantage.

3. Strengthen Yourself
Doubt is the recruiter's worst enemy. The better a grey area is explained, the faster the recruiter moves on; the darker, vaguer it remains, the more the recruiter insists, digs, to understand, not necessarily to destabilize you. You may feel fragile because mentioning a period of unemployment or illness can be very painful. In an interview, it is best to mention these points without dwelling on them, to skim over them so as not to stir up overly painful things. Clarity and synthesis are your allies.