Gaps In a Resume Could Mean Wonder Woman Was Temporarily Out Of Costume

Meghna Singh’s career was well underway until she had children.

She earned a MBA in HR after getting a bachelor’s in physics; began her career in comp and benefits, then moved halfway around the world to metro New York as a TA lead with Infosys. Singh was earning promotions and loving her job when she got married and had two girls. That’s when, like so many women,  she dropped out of the labor market.

Three years and some months later, she was ready to go back to work. “I have so much to offer,” she told her DisruptHR audience in February, that she was sure the interviews would quickly come in. “But I was surely wrong.” 20 applications netted her 20 rejections and not a single interview.

“I had this massive 3-and-a-half year gap on my CV and nobody wanted to look beyond it,” she said. Finally, after going through periods of dejection and despair, success. She landed a recruiting job in the Netherlands where today she is an executive recruiter for McKinsey’sDigital practice in EMEA.

“I am aware how lucky I am to get that break,” Singh says, aware she isn’t the only one to have gone through “that roller coaster.” To help other women — and men — who “go often the beaten track and then find it incredibly hard to get back into the game.”

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Stop dismissing these people, Singh urged, leaving her audience with three suggestions:

1. “Look beyond the obvious. The best candidates don’t always have the best resumes. Wonder Woman or Superman might be out of costume.”
2. “Diversity is not just ethnicity and gender. It’s also diversity of life experiences, backgrounds, diversity of thought.”
3. “For every requisition that you have, try and speak with one person who doesn’t fit the bill 100%.”

In partnership with DisruptHR, TLNT presents some of the best Disrupt presentations from events across North America and now the world. Disrupt talks are modeled on the TEDx concept: Short, to the point talks on all things HR — talent, culture and technology.