Mind The Gap
Recently, I was filling out a renewal form and I was updating my employment status as part of the form, as the website had my previous job listed from my previous application. When I put in the dates that I left my last position, and then my current status and when I started this company, the screen flashed up a red flag and a red-lettered banner that said, “There can be no gaps in employment.”
First of all, stop yelling at me, website! Secondly, I literally paused in the moment and contemplated that statement in red: THERE CAN BE NO GAPS IN EMPLOYMENT. What an inadvertent peek into how we as a society think about work.
As a former VP of People, I am well aware of the recruiter mindset around employment gaps that pervades corporate hiring: “Why is there a gap on your resume?” “Can you explain this gap between jobs?” I’ve always hated those questions and have followed my own rule to never ask them as part of the hiring processes I ran. Because there is a question there, but also maybe an assumption or several. “Did you get fired or laid off and you were unhireable?” “Did you prioritize something outside of work that would make you less committed to this job than we want you to be?” “Are you going to take months off of this job for a family or personal reason, too?” None of these should matter in determining whether the candidate is a fit for the role that you have open and whether they can do the job, and all of the answers to the “gap in resume” questions are irrelevant (and often illegal!) factors to consider in a hiring decision, which is why I don’t ask. So why are so many others asking them? Because we have a hard time, as a society, accounting for the reality of an employment gap for anyone. Our purpose as we understand it is to go from birth to school, from school to work, from work at this job to work at another (hopefully better) job, from work to retirement, and from retirement to the end of our lives. No gaps to mind in there!
But the reality is, there are often gaps in employment, for most/all of us that consider ourselves at a “working” point in our life. Some planned, some unplanned, some emergent, some bucket-list checking. Some are within the larger confines of the dates you are employed at a position (family leave, bereavement, leaves of absence, sabbaticals, PTO, etc.), and some are noted only as a space between dates on a resume (layoffs, terminations, resignations, unemployment, planned time between roles, working on a side hustle, starting your own business, writing your first novel, learning to surf in Australia, learning a craft or skill, going to school, so many reasons!). But whatever the reason, the gap is allowed or encouraged or acceptable—even if a website yells at you sometimes when you fill out your forms.
Because it turns out that there is a secret, that maybe those “gap year” teenagers who postponed college discovered long before some of us did. That being in the gap, for whatever reason you are there, can give us more clarity than being in the everyday grind of employment. Many of us have never had the luxury of taking the time to step back and evaluate if we are spending our time the way we want to be spending it. And, obviously, most of us have to worry about putting food on our table and paying our rent or mortgage or having health insurance and we don’t have the luxury of contemplating the meaning of life while looking frantically for the next role, so, to be clear, I’m not inserting a fairy tale into a crisis here. Your priority is to take care of yourself and your people in the best way you can, and please do that!
But I’m also saying that taking a second to pause and reflect on what is possible and what life looks like doing things differently can be a healthy hesitation, even if taking that time is on a weekend or after work or daydreaming during your lunch break. Our most valuable and limited commodity is time. What do you want to be doing with yours? Sometimes taking a minute or an hour or a month or 6 months or a year (whatever is possible for you) to ask that question can change everything. Mind that gap by being present and observing and evaluating, even if just for a minute, and reset what you can when you can.
There can and will be gaps in employment, no matter what that website says. Use them wisely!