AFTER TIME AWAY FROM WORK, YOU MUST WORK HARD TO IMPRESS EMPLOYERS

Perhaps you were made redundant or took maternity leave for only a few months. Perhaps you took several years off to bring up a family or to recuperate from a serious illness.

Whatever your reasons, employers can be unfairly suspicious of time away from work.

Why did you leave your last job?

This question used to be a worry for candidates who had been made redundant. Today’s job climate is very different from that of only ten years ago – there is no such thing as a “job for life” anymore, and redundancy is losing the stigma that was once attached to it. Honesty may therefore be the best policy.

For example: “The company needed to reduce its headcount by 15%. There were nearly 200 job losses in the UK alone, and thafs why I find myself looking for a new job.”

Why did they select you for redundancy?

When making staff redundant, many companies have a simple policy of ‘last in, first out’. So, if you can, say that you were simply selected because you (and the others who were also made redundant) had a shorter tenure than the remaining members of the team.

Or you could argue that your role was made redundant due to a restructuring in the organisation, then explain that you did not want to take any of the roles that were made available to you, as they offered insufficient challenge.

Why have you been out of work for so long?

Finding a job takes time. Redundancy is often a good opportunity for many candidates to evaluate their goals in life and think about what they really want to be doing for the rest of their careers. Your response could reflect the fact that you have been doing a lot of thinking and research to identify the perfect role for you.

For example: “I realise now that I had been stagnating with Company X. When I was made redundant, I wanted to take a step back and think about the sort of role I wanted as well as the kind of company I wanted to work for. I was doing a lot of networking and talking to head hunters, to figure out what might be right for me.”

I’m worried that your time away from the workforce may put you at a disadvantage

The interviewer may be worried that the reasons that took you out of work (e.g. young children, illness or failure to find a job) may crop up again in the future. Begin by asking: “If you Don’t mind me asking, what is it exactly that worries you?”

For example, if you have young children, you may have to deal with problems about their health or struggle to find good childcare and therefore be unreliable in turning up for work. If you had problems with your health in the past, perhaps the problem could return.

Once you understand the interviewer’s concerns, you can counter them.

you’ve been working for yourself for some time now. Why do you want to be employed by a company again?

Not strictly a question that fits into the category of ‘returning to work’. But still a question that interviewers ask of people who have spent any time working for themselves, perhaps as freelancers. Many interviewers think that setting up in business on one’s own is a way to make more money – so anyone who decides to re-join a company must have failed to succeed at it.

Two ways out of this quandary are to mention:

• That you miss having colleagues to share ideas and the work with.
• The fact that you enjoy a particular core activity, but not the peripheral activities of running a business. For example: “I most enjoy designing. But when you are a freelancer, you spend so much of your time networking and trying to find new clients, and then having to send them invoices and chase payments. I now realise that I would rather focus on the design itself and let other people take care of business development and the administration.”