Comment by jedimastert

I understand your sentiment but you are missing the point. When recruiters of any sort are going through thousands of CV's, they will filter on anything that helps them find candidates more likely to match a job. Regularly out of work because they are bad at a job, regularly out of work because of a one time issue (family death, illness) look exactly the same when filtering for work gaps, but only one of those is a meaningful signal. But its sufficiently uncommon that you may not lose many quality candidates by doing it. This is what bias looks like, and how it is propagated as well. Desigining a system that may be used by thousands of recruiters has to make decisions on these tricky points, and thoughtfully design around them.

Recruiters don't seem to get to the conclusion that I'm "trying to hide a year and a half" because fwiw it can be a month, or just a change of jobs on Jan 01.

Some recruiters look for red flags in order to dismiss a CV. Year out of work could be such a flag. My job is to hide that red flag. Once being interviewed, I will provide the details if asked.