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When stacks of resumes for any given job posting come in, it is natural to set a criterion for wading through them. Often, these come in the forms of required education, years of experience, or relevant experience. Sometimes we allow other things to sideline a resume — grammar mistakes, ignoring directives, or gaps in employment.
I’m the first to say that not following application directions, significant grammar mistakes, or text speak are all great reasons to move a resume aside. However, the time has come to not allow a resume gap to be the thing that sends an applicant’s file to the slush pile, especially if that work experience has the title ‘caregiver.’
There are over 50 million unpaid caregivers in the U.S., more than 5.5 million of those are working with current and former U.S. military members. In short, as of 2020, 1 in 5 Americans will be asked or have no choice but to become a caregiver for a family member. Almost two years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are seeing numbers even higher, especially on the civilian side.
While around half of these unpaid caregivers are able to continue working, and provide care at the same time, most are having trouble maintaining a work-life balance, and that’s a significant topic for a separate discussion.
Here I want to focus on the roughly 30 percent of unpaid caregivers who were forced to choose between the care their loved ones need and full-time employment. These are the caregivers who had to leave behind their positions, work, and financial security in order to take care of their loved ones full-time. The harsh reality is that one day their unpaid caregiving positions will come to an end, and many of these caregivers will be returning to the workforce to provide for themselves and their families.
But entering the workforce means facing the dilemma of how to define that caregiver experience. Many will cut it altogether from their resumes thinking that it’s irrelevant or considered a negative. Hence, the resume gap, and why it’s important to not use that resume gap, or an employment block labeled ‘caregiver,’ to bin resumes into the trash.
In fact, I would challenge you to encourage caregivers to list their experience in their resumes during the application process. Here’s why.
Caregivers returning to the workforce have gained a plethora of real-world experience that can improve the functionality of your organization. This is experience above and beyond the qualifications generally listed on a resume. Encouraging them to relate those experiences as transferable skills, rather than leave it off a resume entirely, is going to give you the absolute best understanding of the applicant’s full range of ability.
Let me give you an example. As a caregiver, I manage my husband’s primary care team and seven specialty teams across three hospitals and three clinics. I can assure you, the sharing of medical records is a mine field to balance between all of the systems, which don’t talk to each other, no matter how many records releases are signed. I learned quickly that each team needed to be constantly kept up to date on treatment plans, whether that was through printed records, records on disc, or a full debrief each time we saw them. Imagine doing this while trying to maintain medication regimens, complete with contraindications and scheduling conflicts. In business-translatable skills, I became a master of inter-organization coordination and cooperation, quality control, and guiding others to positive outcomes in a high-stakes and complex multi-faceted project in a highly regulated and unyielding environment.
I could provide countless examples of such scenarios, including more examples of what I’ve done in over a decade of caregiving. Such skills demonstrate a real depth to my experience and expertise, beyond my multiple degrees or my office and classroom experience. This added depth will catapult any organization willing to hire the right fit for the positions they are filling, especially in today’s workplace environment.
The pandemic helped businesses become far more flexible and intentional about work-life balance. As organizations balanced the risk and reward of gatherings during the pandemic, and weighed the continuation of remote and in-person positions, organizations discovered a new age of flexibility for their employees in terms of work-life balance. Business carved a new frontier and a new normal to enhance their employees’ contributions, and also improved retention of employees and their organizational knowledge.
It’s time to translate that same learning curve into carving a new standard in hiring and employment practices through HR departments and hiring managers. Instead of ignoring applicants with a resume gap, we should be committing to an organizational culture that encourages the disclosure of caregiving on a resume if translatable skills are noted. It’s time to make sure our HR policies are as forward thinking as our workplace flexibility in today’s post-pandemic employment picture.
Even LinkedIn is beginning to recognize a “career break” within their platform.
It’s time to set a new standard for best hiring and employment practices. Have your recruiting teams make connections/partnerships with organizations to actively support caregivers returning to the workplace. Some can be found through Instant Teams, Bridge My Return, Hiring our Heroes, and Military Spouse Employment Project, to name a few.
