- If you get caught, your professional credibility will be irrevocably blown and you will, like as not, lose your job.
- If you do get away with it, you will be looking over your shoulder every day and may find you have lied your way into a square peg in a round hole situation to boot …
When Where How?
When do you explain the fissures in your past and where/how? I would recommend getting the big reasons-to-hire-me up into the reader’s face first. Typically, your cover letter is the first thing read, so you need to move WAY past a perfunctory, “Please find herewith my CV” and get into the meat and potatoes of why you are the answer to their prayers.
Deconstruct it. Break the job you are applying for down into its component elements and rate yourself against the key success factors for the job. If you are not scoring highly, do yourself a favour and don’t apply. If you are the cats pyjamas for the job, clarify exactly why and tell them. THEN you can think about explaining how you fell off the planet for nine months. Twice. In a row.
Functional Schmunctional
The conventional wisdom is that you paper over the cracks in a gappy work history by producing a so-called Functional CV. This style of CV highlights your major skills, clustering your achievements and contributions regardless of when they occurred. For example, you may have done a small amount of account handling in three different jobs in your past; the functional CV allows you to clump all of the skills and experiences relating to those disparate times into one section of your CV so the recruiter doesn’t have to join the dots on this.
The upsides of a functional CV are fairly limited. They can occasionally be useful if you have a stop-start history of employment, or if you are trying to highlight particular activities that you want to undertake in your next job. They can also be useful if you are either applying for positions in a new sector or applying for your first job.
The downsides of this approach, however, can be humongous. Because the functional approach is a less common format than the chronological CV, any experienced reader will look askance at your application and immediately start wondering what you are trying to hide. It is for this simple reasons that I do not recommend using this format. If you don’t provide some sort of chronology or a really good explanation for the crevices, you will be waiting a looooong time for an invitation to an interview.
If the gaps appear way back in the ice age of your career and you have had a strong, contiguous career for the last 5-10 years, then you can go for a Résumé style CV and simply leave your early history off altogether; or covered with a one-liner like: “I spend the early part of my career in the Blah-Blah industry, cutting my teeth in junior roles and learning the intricacies of the business.” Alternatively, you can ‘cluster’ a series of patchy jobs from your past. A typical, no-holds-barred, chronology looks like this:
- June 2004 – Present Widgeting Guru, Smidgets Inc
- Jul 01 – Jun 04 Widgeting Wizard, Fidget & Co
- Dec 99 – Dec 00 Widgeting Manager, Gidgets Ltd
- Jan 98 – Apr 99 Widgeter, Digit Inc
- Mar 97 – Oct 97 Widgeter, Legit Ltd
- Mar 96 – Dec 96 Widgeter, Hitch It & Sons
- Sep 94 – Mar 96 Apprentice,Widgeter, Widgets Inc
Fairly patchy, with two 3-month and two 6-month gaps on there. The one positive in this one is that the individual has stayed in the same industry and has shown steady, if unexceptional, career progression along the way. Why are the gaps such a problem then? Primarily because, in this day and age, no one is going to leave a job to go to nothing unless they have to. Gaps of this nature immediately beg the question: Did the individual go or was he/she pushed; and in either case, why?
In this case, it would be better to ensure that you get to interview, and further, to avoid becoming bogged down in that discussion at interview by ‘glossing over’ these downtimes. A résumé coverage of this person’s working history, clustering the early years, could be presented like this:
- June 2004 – Present Widgeting Guru, Smidgets Inc
- Jul 01 – Jun 04 Widgeting Wizard, Fidget & Co
- Dec 99 – Dec 00 Widgeting Manager, Gidgets Ltd
- 1994 – 1999 Apprentice Widgeter to qualified Widgeter, Various Co.s
It’s not 100% honest, but there has been continuous employment since July 2001 and most employers aren’t going to be too interested in this individual’s life before he/she became a Manager. This individual would just need to make sure that they covered off the January to June 2001 period with a clean, brief explanation. A word of caution – if some gung-ho recruiter goes looking for early references, they will probably uncover the gaps, so you’d better have your story straight and it better be consistent with what those early referees/employers are saying about you.
Reasons not Excuses
If you have moved job-type a lot, or if you have been taking numerous temporary or contract assignments, papering over the cracks like the example above is probably not going to be enough. You will need to provide some degree of explanation with each cluster of piecemeal working history. None of these are ‘safe’ per se, but they are better than nothing and you can measure the acceptability of your pitch according to your success rate and feedback from your network.
- Considering your options
- Travelling – the ‘much-needed career break’ approach
- Doing contract work to fund a job search for a more fulfilling career
- Significant (but now resolved) illness
- Carer for elderly relative
- Winding up a complex estate following bereavement
- Stepping back in to a family business at a critical time
Quick Departures
These happen and they look just awful. You were headhunted for a lot more money, but the organisation was like the ninth pit of hell and you ran screaming out of the door after six months. The tack to take on this is that it took immense courage for you to do this and to admit your mistake not just to yourself, but also (through your CV) to the market. And what did you learn from this experience? Well, at the very least, I trust that you have checked out the organisation you are applying to now with a microscope, so there are going to be no unpleasant surprises on either side this time.
The Long View