Resume gaps in private household staffing read differently than they do in most professional fields, and families who apply standard corporate hiring instincts to this question sometimes draw conclusions that aren’t warranted. The private service professional whose resume shows eight months between positions isn’t necessarily someone whose last placement ended badly. She may have been in a position she cannot disclose by name or detail due to an NDA. She may have taken deliberate time between demanding placements. She may have been selective about her next role in a way that reflects professional confidence rather than difficulty finding work.
Understanding what gaps in private service resumes actually tend to mean, and what questions produce useful information about them, is part of conducting a good candidate assessment in this field.
Why Gaps Are Common in Private Service
Private household positions end for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with the candidate’s performance. The family moves to a different city. The children grow up and the household no longer needs the same staffing level. The principals’ circumstances change through a financial shift, a remarriage, a restructuring of how the household operates. In all of these situations, an excellent professional may find herself between positions not because she left badly but because the position ended through no fault of either party.
These endings leave less public record than corporate employment endings do. There’s no company announcement, no public information of any kind about what happened. A private chef who served a family for six years and whose position ended when the family relocated has essentially the same visible departure record as one who was let go after three months for performance issues. The gap that follows may look the same from the outside in both cases.
This is why the gap itself is less informative than the explanation for it, and why the explanation has to come from the candidate directly and be verifiable through references.
What Gaps Actually Signal Worth Investigating
Not every gap is benign, and the candidate assessment process should explore the explanation rather than accept it without follow-up. The questions worth asking are practical: what was the candidate doing during the gap, does she have references from the prior position that speak to the circumstances of the departure, and is the explanation consistent with what the references say when checked?
A gap that can be explained with specific, verifiable information is probably what the candidate says it is. A gap where the candidate is vague about circumstances, where references from the prior position are unavailable or unwilling to speak, or where the explanation doesn’t hold together under follow-up questions, is worth understanding better before proceeding.
The NDA Factor
Some gaps exist because the candidate cannot legally or professionally discuss the position that preceded them. NDAs in household employment can be comprehensive enough to prevent a staff member from confirming even basic details about who she worked for. A professional subject to a restrictive NDA may be unable to provide the reference information a family would normally expect, through no fault of her own.
When this comes up, the right approach is to ask what the candidate can confirm and to seek references from other positions not subject to the same restrictions. A professional with one NDA-restricted position but a solid reference history elsewhere is in a different situation from one whose entire history is inaccessible.
At Seaside Staffing Company, we conduct candidate assessments with enough depth that we’re not relying on the resume to tell the whole story. The conversations we have with candidates and the reference checks we conduct are where the real professional picture emerges.
