Description
How Would You Justify the Gaps in Your Resume
[00:00:00] Do firms you work with have visa issues for attorneys working overseas. So that was working from overseas.
Yeah. The firms have to do visa filings and stuff. Most of the time, now that work is done, they either hire outside companies, do it for them or the firms do it themselves.
It usually doesn't take very long to get it done. I don't know. That's not my expertise. Unfortunately, I don't know. But it's usually not that difficult.
How would you handle questions about gaps during interviews?
So, these are questions that law firms are asking themselves when they're interviewing for every type of position that they have.
They always want to know--
If you can do the job?
Which means do you have the skills and the experience to do it? In most cases, if they're interviewing you the answer to that is probably going to be, yes. They can tell that from your resume. And then the next question is--
Will you do the job long-term?
So every employer's nightmare is if they hire you and you just quit. If you just leave all of a sudden without anybody doing the work, then they lose money. It's not good for their clients, puts work in on [00:01:00] other people, and so the employers feel if you're someone that's not going to do the job long-term, and doesn't want to stick with it, it's not worth them to train you and to spend time with you or to hire you. Especially, if they can do better.
So when you have gaps in your resume, you typically need to have good reasons for that. There's a thing about the legal profession that's very unusual. I left my clerkship, I don't know, July or something and my new job wasn't going to start 'till September.
Several people said to me, something like, don't have too much time off on your resume. It'll look bad. You have to be careful. And all these people were saying this to me. And I was like, why is everyone saying this? It means I don't understand the legal profession at that point.
The reason is that, if you have a gap on your resume, it looks like you don't want to work and attorneys are expected to continue working all the time. That's very important.
And because they're going to feel like you might not do the job long-term, they may also feel like you might not be able to be managed because maybe, you have a gap. After all, You got fired. So maybe that means, you can't do the job.
Maybe you have a gap because you can't commit to anything.
Maybe you have a gap because it's difficult for people to manage you.
Maybe you have a gap because, once the going gets [00:02:00] tough, wherever you're working, you could just end up leaving. So you don't like your job.
And then if they like you, that's fine, but then they may also ask--
Can they do better?
So the problem, when you start looking at major markets, like New York City and so forth, they have so many people that they can choose from, they can typically do better.
So someone with gaps in their resume, especially if they're not working, it's very difficult to get them jobs in large firms because the firms are just like, why would we take this risk?
So how do you handle the question of gaps? There are a bunch of ways you can do that. And I don't know what type of gaps you're talking about, but if people ask you why you left, you should always try to have good reasons. And then do the best you can with your interview skills.
Now, what would good reasons be? Good reasons would be, the firm, all their partners left, or they shut down an office, or all the partners in my practice area left, or they lost a big client. There was no more work, and so people will buy those excuses, provided there's not too many of them.
And then if there's a lot of gaps, sometimes what you can do, say your resume starts at [00:03:00] 2010, and you've had seven jobs and I'm just 2010 so let's just say 25, let's just put that down just hypothetically. And you've had seven jobs or you've had 10 jobs during that period, and you're currently unemployed. And, during this time you've had several resume gaps, so the way to do that, I would recommend it would be something along the lines of this. So during between 2000, 2010 to 15 or 2010 to 25, you would write something like this.
Several leading law firms,
And then you would say, 1, 2, 3
Broad litigation experience, something like that, trials, depositions, all that sort of stuff. Something along those lines, that's how I would handle it. And, thatbelieve it or not, works. It looks a lot better than glittering your resume with a bunch of different firms and resume gaps. 'Cause then you draw attention to that. And then if people ask the exact dates and so forth, you can certainly write that down on an application [00:04:00] later. But that's what people will focus on. Is the resume looking like that? I recommend everyone do this. It works very well if you had a lot of jobs and especially if you had resume gaps. Now, if you're currently unemployed, you do something like you could write maternity leave, or something along those lines.
But you just need to be very careful about how you make your resume look. if you make it look like you have too much going on in terms of the number of jobs and stuff, it's just not a good idea for you. It's going to hurt you. So that's how I would recommend handling that. And I hope that helps.
