Career breaks: Are they truly candidate red flags?

You’re looking for your next great hire. As you’re browsing relevant profiles on LinkedIn, you stumble across one candidate with an… unusual work experience:

Not your expected job title. Or, a familiar company name.

Instead, a career break.

Employment gaps are not something new. But highlighting them online hasn’t been what recruiters recommend. This is changing now, and you’ll likely start seeing more entries like these, thanks to a feature that LinkedIn recently rolled out. People have the option to add career breaks to their profiles and, this way, explain why they’ve taken time off from work.

You may wonder why people would want to highlight their employment gaps in a competitive job market.

Attitudes and assumptions about resume gaps have started to shift. Employers are more open to candidates who have taken time away. LinkedIn’s new feature is a reflection of this change and is a way of allowing people to give context to their career breaks.