Hi chapo, How the fuck do you find work when you have major gaps in your resume?
Short story: I went through a long fucked up period dealing with addiction and mental health issues. I'm fairly okay now mentally/psychically. But I'm having a real hard time finding work. Last time I had a "real" job was over five years ago, also around the time I graduated college. But I have nothing to put on my resume since then. I have zero networking connects, no one to put as a reference.
I need a job real bad but I don't know what to do. With no experience and no connects I feel like no one wants to hire me, but I can't fulfill those requirements without finding work that I can't get. I fucking hate it.
I'm also dogshit at doing interviews and I don't know how to explain long work absences without freaking out employers. What can I do?
P.S. I don't wanna say where I live for privacy reasons but I do not live in America.
I already have some computer skills, I'll try to brainstorm some ideas about fake companies/websites I could make and "jobs" I can have. It sounds like a lot of work though, I'd have to make fake social media profiles, fake linkedin profiles, etc. Did you find that you had to put in a lot of work to make your company look real or was it just enough to have a website and maybe a defunct twitter account or something?
Don't think of it as a fake company, you're not really pretending you're not the person behind the whole thing, you're just not being particularly upfront about it on your resume. It feels fake because you're making it all up, but you're doing the work for real, and all companies and job titles are made up anyway! You're just picking your own title, really.
As for the social media stuff, once a month, take a day to schedule 5-6 posts on linkedin/twitter/insta/etc, and make a blog post about what you've been doing for the past month. The posts don't have to be in-depth - you can an article related to the field with a brief sentence and honestly that's enough. Knock it all out in the morning on the first of the month, work on the skill the rest of the month, and suddenly you have professional experience after a couple months. It takes maybe a day of dedicated work to set it all up. I didn't even need a website, just the social media was enough, but if you have web design skills and can set up a website that's a major plus.