The shortage of skilled workers is considered inevitable. But what if the problem is not the lack of talent, but the way companies look for it? This article shows why women returning to work – experienced, resilient and highly qualified – could be a key to the solution.
Across the DACH region, boardrooms are echoing with a familiar refrain: there simply isn’t enough talent. Demographic change, digital transformation, and shifting workforce expectations are often cited as the culprits behind an increasingly urgent skills shortage.However, this narrative, while not entirely incorrect, overlooks something crucial.
A highly qualified, motivated, and experienced segment of the workforce is hiding in plain sight: women returning to work after career breaks. These returners are engineers, project managers, analysts, and IT specialists. They speak multiple languages. They have navigated complex professional environments and life events with resilience. And yet, too often, they are filtered out before they even reach the interview stage.
The problem isn’t a lack of talent. It’s a failure to recognize it.
Take Daniela Gulie. She spent 12 years at Hewlett Packard in Bucharest, thriving in a fast-paced IT environment that she loved for its constant change and learning opportunities. When her family relocated to Germany in 2019, she paused her career to integrate her children into a new culture and language. Six years later, with a Salesforce certification in hand and fluent English, French, and B2-level German, she began applying for jobs.
She didn’t expect the road back to be easy, but she also didn’t expect silence. Application after application disappeared into the void. “The biggest challenge,” she says, “is that I don’t even get the chance to go to interviews. Employers see the career break and just pass.”
We must build the workforce we need ourselves.
Vanessa Gentile
Founder Bring Women Back To Work
Her story is far from unique.
In Switzerland, Tania Virtel, an information systems engineer with a master’s in international project management, built her career across Mexico, France, and Switzerland—most recently as an SAP Master Data Manager at Swatch Group. Fluent in French, English, and Spanish, she had led ERP implementations and international teams before a serious health condition forced her to take a three-year break. When she recovered, she assumed her 17 years of experience would speak for themselves. “It’s still me—I haven’t changed,” she says. “I’m ready to contribute, to learn, to grow again. I just need that first opportunity.”
Like Daniela, she found herself sending applications into silence. The difference, she notes, is not capability but perception. “Life pushes you off the highway sometimes,” she reflects. “If companies could create returner programs, it would make an incredible difference—even part-time or fixed-term contracts could be a bridge back in.”
Both women represent a much larger cohort of skilled professionals. According to Vanessa Gentile, who leads the Bring Women Back to Work (BWBW) program, 64% of participants hold a master’s degree and around 30% a university degree. These are not unskilled workers—they are experienced specialists, managers, and technologists. But traditional hiring processes rarely give them the platform to prove it.
The barriers returners face are rarely explicit. Few job ads say “no career breaks allowed.” Instead, the discrimination is embedded in systems and assumptions.
Recruiters scan CVs for uninterrupted career trajectories, assuming that recent experience is the best proxy for future performance. Applicant tracking systems flag gaps as risk factors. Hiring managers fear long ramp-up times. And cultural narratives play a role, too: sabbaticals to travel are often seen as enriching, while years spent caregiving are quietly devalued.
After years of raising children, I can negotiate peace treaties before the coffee gets cold.
Daniela Gulie
Gentile identifies this as a mindset problem. She argues that leaders claiming a talent shortage are frequently adopting a passive stance rather than actively taking responsibility for developing their future workforce. “We have to build the workforce we need,” she says. That starts by re-examining hiring practices that systematically exclude returners.
A CV captures the past; it doesn’t reveal the human capabilities that drive future success. Yet these capabilities—resilience, adaptability, negotiation, crisis management—are precisely what many returners have honed during their career breaks.
Daniela jokes that after years of raising three children, she could “negotiate peace treaties” as a matter of daily routine. But beneath the humor lies a serious point. Parents navigate high-stakes situations, mediate conflicts, and manage logistics under pressure. These are not “soft” skills; they are organizational superpowers.
Confidence is another crucial factor. Many returners enter the job search after years away with diminished self-esteem. BWBW invests heavily in rebuilding that confidence through mentoring, community support, and training. “The lever is really to turn the mindset,” Gentile explains. Once returners regain their professional confidence, their job search outcomes shift dramatically.
For Tania, confidence was also a process of rediscovery. After multiple surgeries and recovery, she describes learning to “bounce back” as both literal and professional. That resilience now defines her approach to work—and, she believes, could strengthen any team willing to look beyond the career gap.
The talent gap won’t close through job boards and wishful thinking. It requires companies to re-engineer parts of their hiring funnel and culture. Four changes stand out:
Adopt flexible hiring models. Trial periods, returnships, or fixed-term contracts can lower perceived risk for employers while giving returners the chance to prove themselves. As Tania Virtel from Switzerland puts it, “If companies could create returner programs, it would make an incredible difference. I think a compromise could be found even if it means part-time, fixed-length contracts, or internships.” Many, like Daniela, echo the same sentiment: just give us the opportunity to show what we can do.
Use alternative resume formats — and hire for skills, not chronology. Gentile advocates for moving beyond traditional CVs, which are backward-looking. Alternative resumes focus on current capabilities and future potential—such as curiosity, adaptability, and problem-solving—not just a linear career history. Embedding skills-based hiring into this process makes the shift tangible: instead of scanning for uninterrupted employment, companies assess the competencies that actually drive performance. This approach not only surfaces hidden talent but also aligns hiring with the agility that modern businesses demand.
Shift leadership mindsets. Leaders set the tone. If they continue to equate gaps with deficiencies, bias persists. But if they look at returners as whole individuals—professionals, parents, caregivers, multilingual citizens—they open new talent pathways.
Support confidence-building and mentorship. Returners thrive when they are met with structured support, not skepticism. Mentoring, peer networks, and learning opportunities can accelerate ramp-up and retention.
None of this is speculative. It’s already happening.
Some companies in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are quietly rewriting the rules. Workday, for example, partners with Bring Women Back to Work to support returners through structured learning and mentorship opportunities. The collaboration offers certification programs, practical training, and community networks that help women re-enter IT roles with confidence.
The impact goes beyond filling vacancies. This partnership signals a cultural shift: talent strategy isn’t just about competing for scarce resources, but about expanding the definition of where talent comes from.
The talent gap narrative has become almost unquestioned in the DACH region business circles. But the evidence tells a more nuanced story. There is talent—but it is often rendered invisible by outdated hiring practices and narrow definitions of “experience.”
Returners are a strategic workforce segment, brimming with skills that companies desperately need: resilience in the face of disruption, adaptability to new technologies, and a hunger to contribute.
Closing the talent gap starts with changing the lens. When companies move from filtering out to intentionally bringing in, they don’t just solve a hiring challenge—they unlock a reservoir of potential that can drive innovation and growth.
The question is no longer whether this workforce exists. It’s whether employers are willing to see it.
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