Over the last few weeks I’ve been contacted for advice by 3 women from Paris, Aberdeen and London. Different cities, different backgrounds, but all reporting a similar experience. Their impressive backgrounds – top engineering/finance/MBA qualifications, 10-20 years of promotion through a business career - have been consistently dismissed by employers with variations on the cursory one-liner, “we have other well-qualified candidates with more recent experience”.

What these women have in common is that they are trying to return to corporate roles after a long career break focusing on their families. None intended to stop working for good when they decided to step off the career track, but they did not anticipate the difficulties they would face in picking up where they left off.

In the past year, there has been some progress in changing UK business attitudes to women returners through the development of ‘returnships’. Pioneered by investment banks, these programmes have demonstrated that talented women are perfectly capable of coming back into senior jobs in the most demanding corporate environments. Over time, broader adoption of returnships could transform employer perceptions, however as yet they are only scratching the surface.

Most women returners continue to face the triple whammy of unconscious bias: gender, age and lack of recent experience. They too often are tarred with the ‘homemaker’ stereotype - assumed to be unambitious, low in self-confidence and inflexible. Even enlightened employers ask us whether all returners want to work part-time. As many are over 45 years old, they can also be perceived as technological dinosaurs and slow learners. One ex-finance director was told she would not be able to “jump back onto the corporate fast train”.

However, the largest barrier to a successful return may be our ingrained biases against people who have been out of the workforce: a US study on unemployment found that managers prefer to hire a less qualified candidate over one who has been out of work for more than six months. They assume that a career gap has resulted in the deterioration of skills.

What I’d like to tell recruiters about returning professionals

They are highly motivated. They’ve taken a break at the pinch-point of their career and now they want to be given the opportunity to prove themselves again and get their careers back. As Credit Suisse described its returner programme participants: “It is a really engaged group. They are talented, experienced, professional women.”

They want to be given interesting and challenging work, as career fulfilment is a major driver for their return. A recent study by Harvard Business School found that highly-educated mothers are more likely to leave companies when they are passed over for high-profile work.

We can’t generalise about how they want to work. Some are looking for a full-time role; others would prefer a part-time schedule.

They will get back up to speed very quickly once they are back in the workforce. Returners usually report that within four to six weeks they have regained their professional confidence and skills.

They can step back into senior roles even after many years out. Returnship participants have successfully reintegrated into senior managerial positions after career breaks of 10 to 20 years.

So before you automatically reject the next applicant with a long CV gap, consider the wisdom of turning down a motivated well-qualified candidate who could bring a fresh perspective to your organisation, simply because she chose to take a pause in her career.