The Normalizing of Career Gaps

You know what they say: Unless you’ve worked at the Gap, you don’t ever want a gap on your resume.

That’s changing, though, as two years of complete uncertainty in almost every area of life has normalized job gaps for a lot of people. In fact, LinkedIn found that there was a 39% jump in career gaps in the first year of the pandemic (2020).

In response, LinkedIn introduced a feature that lets people explain their career gap with a variety of “sanctioned” options such as:

🔹 Caregiving

🔹 Bereavement

🔹 Layoff

🔹 Personal goal pursuit

🔹 A well-being break

Helping normalize the idea of #jobgaps is working, since now, 79% of hiring managers say they’d hire a candidate with a gap on their resume or LinkedIn profile.

For the candidates I see every day in my role as a recruiter, job gaps can mean a lot of different things, and very rarely are they due to laziness or incompetence. It’s nice to see people being given a chance.