Took probably double the amount of time to get a job. I finally asked someone why they cared? They said it looks like others were passing me up for some reason and they did not want to pick someone up who everyone else was passing up.
Hiring in many ways is a guess if you can stand to work with someone or not. Being in any way undesirable hurts you.
What employers are concerned about is people problems and problem people. Dealing with problem employees is very unpleasant and a huge time sink. Since difficult people tend to have difficulty staying employed, time gaps and short engagements on resumes are a somewhat reasonable heuristic. When there are more applicants than you can interview, you have to prioritize the list somehow.
This, although it seems not everyone got the memo, hence a recent conversation I had:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31528057
> Being in any way undesirable hurts you.
Does having gaps make you so though? I'd say not necessarily. I mean, isn't there a workforce shortage at the moment?
Personally, I don't care. I just checked a recent candidate of mine and he... didn't put months in the start/end dates of his projects. If there's a gap there, I wouldn't even know.
I think that at least in tech it was only ever a thing in companies that didn't know better.
I mean, I throughout my career I was fired multiple times and at least twice that resulted in a 3-month gap, only one of them being voluntarily that long.
I now take them on purpose and collected a total of five over the course of 10+ years.
I don't remember anyone ever even touching the subject - perhaps there's something about the date format I'm using in my CV (MM-YYYY - MM-YYYY/present).
In any case my experience is that companies with such ridiculous criteria end up hiring contractors to fill their gaps - this time in their workforce.
Contractors, naturally, don't go through nearly the same recruitment process and yet they manage to do the same job and do it well - those who don't are promplty fired.