Hello everyone. How do I explain these gaps on my resume?

1. I took 12 months off from work to take care of a family member that was ill (2 separate times if 6 months)

2. Got laid off for 6 months

Because of these gaps, I feel like I get rejected from lots of jobs. How do I mention this in my resume? Thank you.

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Put the 12 month family care gap in as a line item. For six month layoff, can you say you freelanced?

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Don’t put Months. Just put years. Months is too granular anyway. That might avoid displaying the 6 month gap if it’s all in the same year.

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Don't put months on your resume, just the years. That's takes care of the 6 month layoff gap appearing on your resume, though it will still appear if you have to fill out an application that requires dates for positions.

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Put years, not months. Also, I do a lot of resume review, and while YMMV, I would respect the candor & responsibility of someone who put a family leave line.

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This makes me sad that one gets rejected because of personal reason gaps in the resume. I had them as well as I had followed by ex husband to another country and left the job for a few years. Getting back was super hard. It’s like the only respectable reason to take a break is to have children else it’s frowned upon. Sorry I do t have much advise for you just venting cause I went through the same thing. Hang in there and reach out to your network. Once the first break comes in things start to move. I will forever be thankful to an ex colleague who took that chance on me and gave me an opportunity to restart after 3yrs.

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Even having children and a break is a pretty hard one to come back from

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Just don’t disclose it

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you can't just not disclose it, the gaps will show up when they do a background check

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No need to put it on the resume, just speak to it with one sentence:
Recurring medical condition that has since been resolved.

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Thank you all. Few more questions:

1. My first 6 months that I took off to take care of my family member was immediately after I graduated from college, I moved to a different state. I had trouble finding a job so I took a temporary contract job for income, did not have benefits, so I had to get another job at the same time for health insurance. I was then able to find another permanent full time job with benefits which led me to leaving my temporary contract job and job that I took for health insurance.

2. My second 6 months that I took off to take care of my family member was after I had gotten my full time job which I was there for a couple of years. I was looking for a consulting job during this time off.

3. My third 6 months that I took off which is because of being laid off. I was in consulting for not even a year.

My question is, since I had all of these breaks in employment, they are all valid reasons, but it looks like I am a job hopper, which I am not. How do I explain all of this? Thank you everyone.

I would definitely switch to years to try to obscure these breaks because if you told me as your hiring manager this story I would probably pass. My concern wouldn't be job hopping, it would be performance. I don't have your full resume, so if you have a reasonably long period of continuous employment and promotions, performance will be less of a concern.

I would interpret this story as, couldn't find a job post-college (what happened with internships/networking in college) in a relatively strong market and then you got laid off (again during a relatively strong market) and didn't have the network or performance record to quickly get employment.

If you can paper over the periods of joblessness with just listing years, I would leave it at that but I would be prepared with a framing that is positive about these periods of time unemployment that alleviate any concern about performance.

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