Eight years of retail, read as a gap
She had eight years on a Trader Joe’s floor and two earlier years at a front desk. Her resume ended with two Linux projects she had shipped. They had real users, and strangers had filed GitHub issues.
One recruiter told her the retail years “read as a gap, not as experience, because nothing on the page connected the two for them.”
The work was there. The next problem was making the page admit it.
The page is the filter here. Eight retail years sit in one part and two Linux projects in another, with nothing connecting them. That leaves the recruiter to score the timeline rather than the work.