A gap in your resume is called a sabbatical. You spent a year doing something else that's more important to you because you can afford it. Medical plus some recovery time is a great reason. But just playing around with some new tech, investing in your education, or even spending time on your other interests, work for charity, or see something of the world, are great reasons. Slacking off may not sound great, but many employers are unlikely to care that much about the gap, and if they do, there's always a more interesting way to phrase it.
I think this sort of statement is thrown around too lightly. It's a bad sign, but there's a limited amount of signal in it. It may not correlate strongly with employee experience, and lots of other positive factors might outweigh it.
Maybe it's just one recruiter's resume filter. Maybe the company actually has a great medical leave policy, or pays really well, or works on something the OP is super excited by. Or maybe the company is just really, irrationally weird about applicants having gaps on their resume, but is otherwise perfectly normal, and it doesn't matter ever again after OP signs an offer.
Sure, given two offers from otherwise identical companies OP should count this as a mark against, and sign an offer from someone who doesn't care. Given offers that aren't otherwise identical, though, what's it worth? $5k in salary? More? Less?
> though, what's it worth? $5k in salary? More? Less?
Maybe a huge amount. If an employer has a negative predisposition towards you, and you already have a small negative signal on your own resume (gap)-- they have the potential to really screw things up for you. The amount of suck you might endure is unbounded, and the probability of your recent experience on your resume becoming worse is too high.
I think this answer misses the point, which is that this information is only a weak predictor of the problems you describe, thus must be discounted accordingly.
How do you discount "personal catastrophe" appropriately, though? Surely the volatility in outcomes is very important, and not some simple expected value.
A 5% chance of my house burning down is much more costly to me than 5% of the economic cost of my house burning down. Indeed, there's not really a (reasonable) discounted price I will take for a chance of my house burning down.
Of course, this kind of aggressive avoidance of risk is exactly the thing we are annoyed with the employer for... But most employers do not have their eggs in one basket to the extent that someone returning to their career from a gap does.
You normally wouldn’t discount linearly. But that doesn’t mean you can’t put a price on it. There’s a limit to how much you’d pay for insurance, for example. Some risk is part of life.
I didn't say one can't put some price on it. I said "maybe a huge amount" in comparison to someone saying that perhaps one would value it at $5k.
$5k this year is small compared to future potential career earnings; not much of a difference in probability of losing those is required to far exceed $5k. Just strict linear expected value could be bad, let alone when one weights the risk and volatility.
I'll echo this, and add in what some other commenters have said below: you might want to consider leading with your sabbatical in an interview. Talk about it in a positive way, and how you're refreshed and ready to come back to work now.
I would advise against leading with it... and having a glaring hole in the resume timeline.
So, (eg) if you didn't work all of 2018 and 2019, don't list that time at all, unless you did something relevant to your career.
I certainly wouldn't open with it... nor avoid it. Honesty is the best bet. If it comes up, sure talk about it, but talk about what you did to keep your finger on the pulse, what you researched, etc... just like you would with any talking point in an interview.
Once, early on as a kid I took 12 months off (but wrote an accounting package and some stock market correlation tools), and regularly took a month or six off between gigs.
Of course there are creative ways to present that as a sabbatical too, but that might be putting a bit too much spin on things. The big question is: what did you do in that time apart from job hunting. Did you study new skills in order to put them on your CV and improve your chances? Then focus on the new skills you learned.
In my experience, though, it's not that big of a deal. I've been unemployed for over a year in the wake of the dotcom crash, from 2003 to 2004 in my case. I still regret not using that year more productively, and mostly spent it playing Morrowind. Applied for tons of jobs in the mean time, but couldn't even get invited to an interview. Once I did find a job, I found 3 of them. 3 employers were suddenly eager to hire me, and none of them cared that I spent that year mostly playing Morrowind. Sometimes the job market just sucks, and many employers understand that. But your story certainly looks better if you spent that year working on some interesting private or open source project, instead of playing a game.
