| What I learned in my career so far is that all these things that supposedly harm your resume are actually good things; they serve as a filter for exploitative and undesirable companies. For example, I bet the real reason why Amazon didn't hire you is because they want to hire people who are afraid to take any time off; people who don't have a personal life. They want people who they can fully control. The requirements of a company says a lot about the company. Having a 'bad' history can actually help you in finding the right job for you. For example, I'm pretty sure that if you put in your resume something like "I want to get paid a lot for minimal effort because I'm lazy" and you distribute a few thousand copies of your resume, you will get responses and you will find what you asked for. The worse your history is, the fewer responses you will get; you can easily mitigate that problem by scaling up the number of resumes you send. You have to be prepared to move cities and/or countries though. IMO, if 10% of applications result in an interview offer, you're not doing your job search correctly. You need to design your resume and your strategy so that you only get less than 1% response rate. Gaps in your resume are useful in filtering out undesirable companies. Also, changing companies often is also good for filtering out undesirable companies. You want to work for companies who think they're special ("not gonna happen to us" type of thinking), then after you start working for such company, they're more likely to give you a raise when you ask for one because once inside, your history of quitting gives you leverage; they know what will happen if they don't give you a raise. |