Why YSK: Interviewers like to weed out people who have gaps in their employment history for myriad nonsensical reasons. If you remember that this is all just a game to the employer, you can play to win.
Fill the gaps with a story about a failed foray into entrepreneurship in a related field.
I had a massive gap and this worked gangbusters after six months of constant rejection. The gap was caused by my mother's health rapidly deteriorating, and my sense of responsibility to care for her - which became a full time job until she passed.
After that, I went through the dehumanizing experience of dozens of interviews where I was asked about the gap. Describing why I took the time out of the workforce was hard enough - adding insult to injury was the homogenous reactions among all interviewers. You could watch them mentally write me off in real time, and then go through the motions before sending me off to wait for a "the organization has interviewed several great candidates" email.
It occurred to me that instead of baring my pain for callous interviewers, what they'd rather hear about was a "go-getter" whose spirit has been broken enough to come crawling back to the rat race. So I concocted a story about a failed attempt at being an entrepreneur in their industry.
Lo, and behold - After I stopped telling the truth and started telling people about Vandelay Industries` mighty struggle to remain solvent due to market forces, I found myself with three offers in the same number of weeks.
The difference in interviewers` whole demeanor between "took care of dying mother," and "had to see if I could get Vandelay Industries off the ground while I was young enough to be able to recover from a failure" was night and day.
Read about failed startups. Rehearse.
Everybody lies in the corpo-world. Lie better.
Absolutely wild and extremely accurate advice. Hats off to you-- and extremely sorry for your loss. Baring the pain is hard, and harder to lie about.
HR knows everyone lies, but really it's a thing about how to market yourself... and we all know marketing's mostly wading through vaguely legal BS anyway. Any proper white collar job these days wants a golden goose employee that eats crap and craps gold-- them's the works.
Adding onto the YSK, any personal project can be properly spun into a good employee gap as long as you can at least back it up. Podcast, github project, spin up an LLC, started selling porcelain dolls locally or something. If you're no good at spinning up a story, just being able to make the person on the other end of the line believe that you have 1. a fast capacity to learn, 2. are flexible with learning, and 3. are willing to take extreme duress and go-gettering, it gives you a bit more rope to work with than otherwise.
Again, sorry for your loss. One can only wish we lived in a world where even the slightest employment gap wasn't looked at with a microscope. Hopefully with the years we might live in a world where this lessens. The HR at my current company I consider pretty solid, hopefully the 'european model' spreads.