Don’t worry too much about it for EAish orgs, as long as your CV is relevant enough to pass the earlier stages, you have a lot of opportunities to demonstrate your fit that goes beyond CV info
If you did something in the meanwhile that you can frame in a way that credibly shows something beneficial or interesting about yourself (e.g., international travel, self-study), I’d probably put it in
If you didn’t, just leave it out. After a couple years in the workforce, people’s stations tend to get too long for the ideal CV length for most roles anyway (ideally 1 page, 2 pages max) and you’ll likely end up leaving out whole irrelevant job stages anyway. For early stages, what’s usually most important is that there is (some) relevant experience in your CV, how much differs for each role and org.
In the later stages, I will probably look at your LinkedIn to see if I can find out what happened during a long gap and if there’s nothing in there I’ll ask about it in the interview. By that stage you’ll already have impressed through things like test tasks so it’s a smaller piece of info unlikely to strongly change my impression unless it’s relevant for the role
If it’s something that could be relevant for a job (such as burnout), what I am then ideally looking for is a sense of “the candidate has reflected on it, understood why it happened, and taken convincing measures to keep it from happening again”, plus hopefully the thing(s) that caused it aren’t things likely to happen in the role you’re applying for
Most of the above may apply a bit less in other EAish orgs, and definitely outside EAish ogs
Hi Joseph! My take:
Don’t worry too much about it for EAish orgs, as long as your CV is relevant enough to pass the earlier stages, you have a lot of opportunities to demonstrate your fit that goes beyond CV info
If you did something in the meanwhile that you can frame in a way that credibly shows something beneficial or interesting about yourself (e.g., international travel, self-study), I’d probably put it in
If you didn’t, just leave it out. After a couple years in the workforce, people’s stations tend to get too long for the ideal CV length for most roles anyway (ideally 1 page, 2 pages max) and you’ll likely end up leaving out whole irrelevant job stages anyway. For early stages, what’s usually most important is that there is (some) relevant experience in your CV, how much differs for each role and org.
In the later stages, I will probably look at your LinkedIn to see if I can find out what happened during a long gap and if there’s nothing in there I’ll ask about it in the interview. By that stage you’ll already have impressed through things like test tasks so it’s a smaller piece of info unlikely to strongly change my impression unless it’s relevant for the role
If it’s something that could be relevant for a job (such as burnout), what I am then ideally looking for is a sense of “the candidate has reflected on it, understood why it happened, and taken convincing measures to keep it from happening again”, plus hopefully the thing(s) that caused it aren’t things likely to happen in the role you’re applying for
Most of the above may apply a bit less in other EAish orgs, and definitely outside EAish ogs
All the best! :-)