I was reading Liz Ryan’s column in Business Plus this morning, “Who’s lucky anyway?” and she hit the nail on the head regarding resume gaps and returning-to-the-workforce moms. I quote:

“It’s absurd, Employers behave as though moms managing busy kids and households are utterly without marketable skills. That gap on the resume is as off-putting to them as garlic to a vampire. That’s a shame.”

I couldn’t agree more. And I believe this applies not only to returning-to-the-workforce moms but to everyone as a whole. Especially in this day and age when employees may not be as married to their employment as employers would like. I know many folks that have taken time off to go climb a mountain, explore a foreign country, sail the oceans, be with their family, or generally enjoy life for a period of time. Maybe this is just my experience living in Boulder, anyhow.

The common practice by HR and Recruiters that involves filtering out resumes with temporal gaps in their employment history is ridiculous. Should I take some time of for whatever reason, that doesn’t mean I’ve all of a sudden forgotten everything I’ve learned. In fact I’d argue that in many instances (Ahem, Aerospace for example) many employees sometimes go months or years at a time working on tasks that do not involve their core competencies. I know many colleagues that have spent six, maybe twelve months writing countless amounts of useless technical documentation, not touching a single line of code during that time. Perhaps you HR folk, and especially you employment Recruiters should start doing your job and find a better way to deal with this overwhelming resume burden that you are faced with each day. Filtering on simple typos and resume gaps well, give me a goddamn break.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 10:07 am and is filed under Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.