For parents who want to get back to work, ‘choosy’ employers and lack of confidence stand in the way

• COVID-19 school closures made it harder for parents to look for work or stay in the workforce.
• One barrier parents looking to join the workforce may face is being overlooked by employers.
• Despite obstacles, the hot labor market means it’s a good time to look for a new job.

Parents who left the workforce during the pandemic are having trouble going back.

Many have to figure out how to address career gaps in interviews. They have to demonstrate they have experience employers want, even if they’ve been out of the workforce. And they have to juggle applying to jobs while still taking care of their children.

Feeling discouraged from not hearing back from employers, childcare issues, and other obstacles may make it tough for parents to find work.

But it’s not all bad news.

“I think in this moment, because there’s so much change and people are coming and going, it is really an excellent opportunity or time to be looking to get back into the labor market at all levels,” C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of Institute for Women’s Policy Research told Insider.

Here are the obstacles facing parents who are ready to go back to work.

“Choosy” employers may prefer people who never left the workforce

Jasmine Tucker, director of research at the National Women’s Law Center, said she’s concerned that although employers may be willing to overlook pandemic-related resume gaps, they may also take a pass on people who left the labor force for someone else who hasn’t had to take a step back, if they have a lot of applicants.

“I think that employers can be choosy right now, and I’m not optimistic about their goodwill in hiring people who’ve been out of the labor force,” Tucker said. 

Tucker also said people who left to be stay-at-home parents may not be able to afford to take a class or go back to school because of lost earnings from not being in the labor force, and employers may decide to go with someone else who has additional education or training instead. 

Lack of childcare is still a major problem

“Many women and many families stayed on the sidelines during the pandemic because care was so unpredictable,” Mason said. Childcare support and childcare subsidies, she added, can really help working parents.

Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said it wasn’t just closures but uncertainties around school and daycare reopenings. This uncertainty, Gould said, especially impacted moms and parents with young kids. Moms were also more likely than fathers to be in jobs hard hit by pandemic-related closures early on in the pandemic, according to a Census post.

A Minneapolis Fed article published in February 2021 highlights some of the pandemic’s effects on working parents of young children, which is defined in the piece as kids who are less than five years old. The authors wrote that both fathers and mothers of children in this age group exited the labor force at high rates in April 2020, when businesses were laying off people and feeling the impact of the first wave of the pandemic.

“While nearly all fathers returned to the labor force, mothers regained virtually none of their lost ground, remaining 2.8 percentage points below their November 2019 participation rate—an extremely large change by historical standards,” the authors wrote.

An analysis by Pew Research Center with Census Bureau data as of 2016 show that a higher share of stay-at-home moms were not working because they’re taking care of the home or family than the share of stay-at-home dads who cite this reason. Twenty-four percent of stay-at-home fathers said they are not working because they’re taking care of the home or family in 2016, while 78% of stay-at-home moms said this is their reason behind not working. 

Insecurity is a real barrier

Another barrier that may keep stay-at-home parents from returning to employment could be just being scared, according to Amanda Livingood, senior director of corporate communications at Glassdoor. She said parents may be worried whether this transition will work for their family. Livingood said many workers returning to the workforce aren’t feeling confident in coming back.

“You’ve got this fear that your skills are rusty. You’ve been out of the game,” Livingood said. “You’ve lost contact with your business network and you’re just not quite sure you know how to do the job anymore.” 

She said returnships, programs for people looking to rejoin the workforce, could be one way for parents rejoining the labor force to feel supported.

Unemployed parents in general regardless of stay-at-home status are worried about the kind of jobs they can get. According to a FlexJobs survey of over 500 unemployed parents who aimed to find work and that was conducted between July and August 2021, “a whopping 75% of respondents said that the most important thing they’re looking for is the right job opportunity,” FlexJobs wrote.

“At the time this survey was conducted, stay-at-home parents were mostly feeling optimistic about their job prospects,” FlexJobs wrote, where 26% of survey respondents said they left to be a stay-at-home parent. “Over two-thirds of respondents (66%) felt optimistic about their employment prospects in the next six months, while 22% were neutral, and only 12% felt pessimistic.”

But the labor market is hot and it’s a good time to look for work

Employers are looking to find new workers during the Great Resignation, companies are offering flexible arrangements during the pandemic, and some employers are not putting too much emphasis on resume gaps. So now may be a good time for a stay-at-home parent considering a job to search for one. 

“I do hope the worst of the pandemic is behind us, and now the road to recovery will be less hampered by the ebbs and flows of the pandemic,” Gould said. “So I do think that there are more opportunities now to be able to get back into the labor force and get a job and not be hampered by school closures and daycare closures.” 

While parents may have years without work experience at a job, Livingood said resume gaps may not be a problem given the pandemic.

“I think really now with the pandemic, regardless of whether it was ‘okay, I just stayed home the past two years’, or, ‘I was at home and I was planning to go back, but then the pandemic hit,’ I just think there’s overall more understanding and grace extended to people who are looking to get back in the workforce,” Livingood said.