The resume gap isn’t just for mothers anymore.
As more men leave the work force to care for their children — 160,000 according to the most recent US Census (nearly three times as many as a decade ago but a tiny number compared with the roughly 6 million stay-at-home moms) — they get to wrestle with questions that mothers who opt back in have long faced. How to camouflage that glaring white space between your last job and the present? How to strategically describe the time spent at home?
The good news seems to be that gaps on resumes are now so common in the US as to be the norm, recruiters and consultants say.
The bad news? That’s true, unless you are a man.
“The business world finally understands women leaving the workplace and then returning,” said Elaine Varelas, a managing partner of Keystone Associates, an outplacement and career management firm in Boston. “But men who do it are often considered suspect in terms of their investment in their career. They have a tougher case to make going back.”
Acceptance of returning fathers “seems to be generational,” said Brian Reid, 33, who in 2002 founded RebelDad.com, a site about the “stay-at-home dad trend.” “It makes dads nervous knowing that they are not likely to be interviewed by a peer, who gets this, but by a 55-year-old middle manager, who might have a wife or a daughter who has left the workplace and come back, but who doesn’t understand it in a man.”
The small but growing group of stay-at-home men would be well advised to take some cues from the women who blazed the trail. There is poetic turnaround in that suggestion. For so long, women entering the working world tried to act like men, and now men leaving that world are studying the hard-won lessons of returning women.
Lesson one seems to be “leave strategically.” In the decade that I have covered life and work, I have been puzzled at how women didn’t take full advantage of their moment of departure. An employee never has more power than when she is willing to leave. But women were simply leaving rather than using their leverage to ask for the moon — a sharply decreased workload or increased salary or guarantee of a job upon return — on the chance they might get it. In recent years, women have negotiated more, a trend not lost on men.
Colin Pritchard, for one, was not inclined to leave without a plan. “I lined up freelance work so I wasn’t breaking ties all of a sudden,” he said of his 2005 departure from a full-time job as a graphic designer of food packaging, when his first son was 8 months old. His wife, a registered nurse, had been promoted to department manager, and her new salary was enough to support the family while he provided childcare.
In part what men have learned is to keep a mental eye on their resume during their years out of the work force. Earlier this decade, too many women were surprised that large blank spaces did not impress those who hire. Now a lot more advice is available online, in local community center classes, from career counselors on how to structure a resume to work around that gap.
Nat Hefferman, who left a job in financial services a decade ago to stay home with his two daughters, now 11 and 5, has taken such a class. (He was the only man in the room.) He did so long before he was actually ready to go back to work, he said.
One emphasis of the class was that volunteer work can act as a surrogate for paid work, so he has made sure to spend some of his time writing the preschool newsletter and organizing publicity for an amateur musical group (of which he is also a member).
Part-time work is also attractive, he’s learned, and he has recently begun copy editing for his wife’s company, Beacon Street Girls, which produces an online community for 11- to 14-year-olds.
The wave of stay-at-home mothers who forged this trail in the last decade learned that volunteering and part-time gigs aren’t just resume filler. Those jobs also curb the creeping feeling of invisibility that can come from leaving paid work. “At dinner my wife had work stories, my kids had school stories and I would talk about making mac and cheese,” said Dan Mayville, who left his sales job three years ago to be home with his children, who are now 12 and 10.
Mayville spent his first year at home looking at franchise opportunities, then decided to go for his MBA instead. It was “a deliberate strategy for saving face,” he said. His new goal made his time at home “feel different to me and look different to everyone around me,” Mayville said. “I could get together with old friends and feel more like I belonged. We could talk about business.”
Last year, when Mayville applied for a job with Deloitte, he was asked about his hiatus. But the fact that the company has a reputation for actively recruiting candidates with unusual backgrounds, coupled with his new MBA, meant the years at home were not “the obstacle I’d been afraid of,” he said. He was hired by the company’s human resource group, a job he took with the understanding that he could work from home, so he could see his children off to school and be there when they returned.
Pritchard, in turn, thinks he will never need to explain his resume gap to an employer, because he expects he won’t ever hold a salaried office job again. His sons are in day care three days a week now and he has so much freelance graphic design work that he has had to bring in four subcontractors; he’s begun the first steps toward incorporating as a business.
Hefferman most likely won’t have to worry about a re-entry interview, either. While filling in at his wife’s company, he has decided that he enjoys copy editing more than he did his old job in financial services.
The upside of continuing on his new path? When your employer is also your wife, he says, “it doesn’t work against you that you’ve taken time off.”
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