The Résumé Gap
What if the time you stepped away says more about you than the job you left behind?
This post is part of our series: Thoughtful Insights.
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In the spring of 2023, Lena adjusted her collar and clicked “Join” on a Zoom call for her fifth job interview of the month.
She smiled into the camera, trying to project calm. Her résumé glowed with experience—eight years in content strategy, a stint managing a global team, case studies of viral campaigns and conversion wins. But there, like a shadow she couldn’t erase, was the 14-month employment gap.
The recruiter was polite, energetic. “Can you walk me through what you were doing during the gap year?”
Lena had practiced this answer.
She’d stepped away to care for her father, whose Parkinson’s had worsened. She had taken online courses, done some freelance work, and volunteered with a mental health nonprofit. It wasn’t a vacation. It wasn’t idleness.
The recruiter nodded. “That’s admirable. But there’s some concern about how up-to-date your skills are—especially with all the AI changes lately.”
By the end of the week, Lena received the familiar rejection: “We’ve gone with someone whose experience is more recent.”
More recent. Not better. Not deeper. Just… closer to now.
We like to say we live in a society that values growth, empathy, and resilience. But try explaining a résumé gap to an algorithmic filter—or even a human one conditioned by urgency and bias—and the story changes.
Lena’s story is not rare. It’s the growing tension between lived experience and marketable experience. Between who we are and how we’re evaluated.
In a world accelerating toward real-time relevance—where skills must be constantly refreshed and algorithms determine who gets seen—gaps are treated like threats.
Time off, whether for caregiving, mental health, travel, recovery, or simply reflection, gets framed as a liability.
And in doing so, we flatten people’s stories into timelines with no room for pause.
This obsession with continuity is a relatively modern invention.
In the 19th century, most professions followed a nonlinear path. Apprentices became journeymen, shifted trades, returned to farms, paused during wars or harvest seasons. Work was part of life—not its master.
It wasn’t until the rise of the corporate ladder in the mid-20th century, when résumés became linear artifacts of progression, that gaps began to look suspicious. In the Cold War era, especially in the U.S., continuity was equated with reliability, ambition, and loyalty. A break in employment suggested deviance, laziness, or failure.
Even now, decades later, we haven’t outgrown that fear.
We build LinkedIn timelines like alibis, afraid of being perceived as drifting.
But what if drift isn’t failure? What if it’s part of becoming?
The deeper issue isn’t just employment gaps. It’s the way our systems define value.
We’ve inherited a model of success that prioritizes uninterrupted productivity, even when our lives are messy, unpredictable, and human. We measure relevance in recency. We treat self-directed growth as less legitimate than institutional titles.
And in doing so, we exclude people at their most vulnerable—and their most profound.
Because what doesn’t fit on a résumé often reveals more about a person than what does.
The parent who raised a child while freelancing at midnight learned calm under pressure, time management, and emotional resilience.
The caregiver who stepped away to tend to a loved one learned patience, advocacy, and how to navigate complexity without a roadmap.
The traveler who spent a year immersed in unfamiliar cultures learned adaptability, deep listening, and how to move through uncertainty with grace.
The volunteer who worked with under-resourced communities learned empathy, ingenuity, and how to lead without authority.
These aren’t detours. They’re depth.
Lena eventually found a job. Not through an application portal, but through someone she had helped years ago who remembered her kindness during a chaotic product launch.
It paid less than her previous role. But in her first performance review, her manager wrote: “You bring calm to complexity. The team trusts you instinctively.”
No AI course could teach that.
So here’s the quiet truth: the résumé doesn’t tell your whole story. It can’t.
And if we’re serious about building workplaces that value humanity, we must stop treating time away as time lost.
Instead, we need new questions:
What did you learn in the gap?
What did life teach you when work wasn’t the center?
What would our companies gain if we stopped fearing the pause—and started honoring it?
Because maybe the people who stepped away and came back aren’t behind.
Maybe they’re the ones most ready for what’s next.
This post is part of the Remote Jobs and You newsletter on Substack. Each edition brings you the latest remote job opportunities and an insightful read tailored for modern professionals.