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The gap itself is only part of it, a lot of recruiters are screening for whether it looks active and relevant right away. If I were in your spot, I’d make the last 18-24 months read like real momentum, even if it’s contract, freelance, volunteering, certs, or a short project with a concrete outcome.
What matters most is not just putting something there, it’s making it clearly job related. I’ve seen people get better callbacks just by tightening the headline, adding the right keywords, and making sure the resume doesn’t look like a black box to ATS parsing.
If your work history has a big blank stretch, I’d also build a one-line “Recent Experience” section and keep it honest but active. The little stuff matters too, like making sure your dates line up cleanly and there’s nothing weird in headers/footers that can get skipped when an ATS reads it. I’d also run it through ResumeJudge or something similar once, just to see if the formatting or keywords are getting you filtered before a human even sees it.