[cauterized]

To me as a hiring manager, a deliberately unemployed stretch looks very different from an unintentional one.

If you wanted to take time off - to find yourself;travel and enjoy being young; take care of family who were ill; recover from burnout; work on a side project; or just take time to carefully consider and select your next opportunity - and you could afford to do it, more power to you.

If you're an engineer who was trying to find a job for 3-6 months in the current climate and couldn't, that raises a red flag for me. Companies are falling all over themselves to hire engineers. If you're unhirable now, you're probably unhirable, period.

Note that my standard is a bit different for other specialties. The market for many other professions is much more employer-friendly and less employee-friendly. A customer service manager or a PR specialist who needed six months to find a job may be great to work with and great at their job but just battling a weak job market and absurd levels of competition and gets more leeway from me.

In any case, like a lot of things, it comes down to framing and telling a good story about it.