If you're reading this between jobs, the first thing to know: gaps don't kill applications on their own. Unverifiable gaps do.
A clean six-month break with a clear story and some concrete work output reads as a deliberate sabbatical. The same six months with nothing attached reads as an evasion. Same gap, different signal.
Here's how to make the time work for you, in roughly increasing effort.
Low-effort: clean up what's already there
Before producing anything new, audit what already exists. Most candidates haven't looked at their public footprint in years.
- Make sure your GitHub profile has a pinned project that loads, runs, and has a sensible README.
- Update your LinkedIn dates so the timeline is honest. A gap with the right framing is fine. A timeline that doesn't add up is fatal.
- Get one good headshot. Sounds shallow. Isn't. It's the thing every screener sees first.
- Write — actually write — three to four lines of summary at the top of each prior role, focused on outcomes. Specifics, numbers, names of products.
Medium-effort: build something small
You don't need a venture-scale side project. You need one finished thing that shows your work.
- A small open-source contribution, ideally to a project a screener has heard of. The PR itself is the artifact.
- A single substantial blog post explaining a real technical decision you've made, with code samples and tradeoffs. Hosted somewhere durable.
- A focused side project — something you can describe in 60 seconds and link to in two clicks. Avoid scope creep.
One finished small thing beats five abandoned big things, every time.
Higher-effort: contract
If your situation allows it, even a short paid engagement converts the gap into something with a payslip behind it. The dollar amount doesn't matter much. The fact that it happened at all is what counts.
- A 4-week consulting engagement with a previous employer.
- A short fixed-scope contract through a small agency in your network.
- An advisory or fractional role for a startup in your circle.
This is also the highest-leverage thing for verification on Dealt — payroll-confirmed work shows up cleanly in the credential check.
What not to do
- Don't list "Stealth Startup" without an actual stealth startup. We've written about this elsewhere; screeners are increasingly wise to it, and the cost of getting caught is high.
- Don't pad with "self-study" entries that are just things you read. They don't survive a single follow-up question.
- Don't make it a course-collecting period. One real cert in a directly-applicable area is fine. Six is suspicious.
The principle
Time you can't account for becomes time someone else accounts for, badly. Your job during the gap isn't to pretend the gap isn't there. It's to leave a trail that makes the gap legible — to a future screener who has 90 seconds and no patience.
— The Dealt team