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TIL a resume gap of 5 months is not the problem, the format I used to hide it was
I left my last job in Denver back in March and figured I would just leave the gap off my resume and hope nobody asked. Six weeks and 40 applications later, a recruiter at a staffing agency in Boulder finally told me the screening software was flagging my dates because the months did not line up. Redoing the whole thing with a simple skills-based layout took one afternoon, and I had two interviews the next week. Has anyone else had a recruiter actually explain why the gap was getting filtered out?
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morgan.adam15d ago
Honestly my resume around that time looked like a game of connect the dots where somebody lost the pencil. I did the same thing you did, just chopped off the months and hoped the software would be too dumb to notice, which is funny because the software was way smarter than me. What got me was that a lot of those systems check for a straight timeline, so any weird spacing or missing months makes your file pop up as a flag before a human ever sees it. A recruiter in my area explained it to me once and it was like someone turning on the lights in a dark room. Swapping to a skills based layout fixed it for me too, and I wish somebody had told me years earlier that the gap was never the issue, the messy dates were.
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