LET’S say you were unemployed for a long time, switched jobs after a bout with depression or were dismissed from a job. Do you put that into your resume, or do you conceal it?
“Gaps and embarrassing spots in their CV are, in my experience as a personnel consultant, something that terribly bothers people,” says Ines Schoffmann.
Hiding or not revealing them is usually the wrong approach though, says Schoffmann, who has a degree in psychology and coaches job applicants.
Why? Because it tends to make applicants tense up in a job interview, who lose openness and authenticity and feel the interview to be “like a police interrogation”.
The interviewer senses this, and the applicant’s chances at landing the job sink.
Schoffmann gives tips for three situations to better present rough spots in your employment history:
For HR decision-makers, stretches of unemployment have become perfectly normal. “People nowadays no longer work for 40 years straight at the same company,” she says.
So personnel managers find the common attempts to hide these stretches in CVs to be “really awkward”. A “no go” is to describe them instead as private projects, career reorientation, self-discovery or personal time-outs.
Another is to enumerate employment durations only in years, but not months.
Schoffmann’s advice: “Let a gap be a gap.” You needn’t write that you were unemployed, she says, as it’s only logical you were if you were between jobs at the time.
If the period of unemployment had nothing to do with you, and was due to the company’s insolvency or site closure, for example, you should mention this in your CV.
Factors such as moving house that may have led to your temporary unemployment should be detailed as well.
If you’ve broken off a course of education or training, the same principle applies: An attempt to hide it is worse than the truth, Schoffmann says.
For experienced job applicants in particular, having a formal degree is “in most cases completely irrelevant” anyway.
This doesn’t mean you should leave curtailed studies or training out of your CV altogether. If you, say, attended classes for three years, you probably learned something whether or not you earned a degree.
But Schoffmann advises against expressly saying you dropped out. Rather, you should simply state the duration of the studies or training, and the educational institution.
An example: 2010-2012, Bachelor’s programme in timber construction, Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences. That’s it.
You should be prepared if you’re asked about the missing degree.
Schoffmann recommends always giving a positive reason, such as: “I decided to work full time because the job I had then was very enjoyable and challenging.” This way, you turn what’s seemingly a failure into a conscious decision on your part.
In the case of breaks due to illness or a personal crisis, Schoffmann says lots of details are better than too few.
“People – risk-averse HR decision-makers in particular – always instinctively fill information gaps with their imagination,” she says. “And their imaginings are often worse than the reality.”
Being transparent prevents their imagination from running riot. So instead of writing, say, merely “rehabilitation stay”, you should write “rehabilitation stay following hip operation” – and add that you’ve fully recovered.
Nevertheless, you should be prepared for pertinent questions. It helps if you can describe how you overcame your health problem or personal crisis as well as what you’ve since changed and are doing to prevent a recurrence.
“As a general rule I recommend maximum openness,” says Schoffmann, noting that few occupational groups are lied to as often as personnel managers are.
“That’s why they love job applicants who are authentic, open and honest.” – By AMELIE BREITENHUBER/dpa
