When you are creating your resume, you don’t need to put every random job you’ve ever had. What companies do is they look at your jobs on the resume, and at most call the employer and ask them if you worked for them and how you did at the job.
There is no way for a non government employee to know if you worked other jobs. Keep off any jobs that you worked at for less than 2 years and use every skill you learned as a skill for your resume.
Nothing hurts your resume more than having 3 or 4 jobs in a span of 2 years because it shows you are unreliable.
Omit jobs held less than 2 years? In this economy? They’re all less than 2 years! Props to those who’ve held jobs for several years because you must be comfortable. Most people shopping aren’t comfortable and changing jobs has gotten me more money than any in-house raise ever did.
The longest I’ve ever stayed in one job is my current job. Which is currently rocking in on 2 and 1/2 years now. The second longest was 18 months. I’m not old enough to have decades worth of experience I don’t know what they want.
I know for a fact that none of my references have ever been contacted for a reference. I have my old university professor is one of my contacts because at the time I was applying for jobs I didn’t have any other possible references I’d had no prior work experience.
Anyway I never got round to actually be removing his name and a few years ago he contacted me to tell me he was retiring (I don’t know why he felt the need to tell me this), I asked him if anybody had ever asked him to provide a reference and he said no one had ever contacted him about it for me, or anyone else who’d put him down.
a couple thoughts:
- I usually have a section called “Relevant Work” and another called “Other” where I say “Additional experience with [list my non-relevant jobs]”
- if you are taking time off from working, try to do something educational at the same time. classwork at a local university / community college is great, or do online classes or even a bunch of tutorials and/or an open-source/volunteer project. then you can say: “I always wanted to learn about (that topic) so I took some time off to really study it.” it’s most beneificial if it’s work-related, but it doesn’t have to be.
- present yourself in the best light, but do not outright lie on your resume because that might come back to bite you.
Nothing hurts your resume more than having 3 or 4 jobs in a span of 2 years because it shows you are unreliable.
Yeah having no jobs for a span of 2 years would hurt your application more…
These are tears of…unrelated crying.
I’m not in this post and it definitely doesn’t hurt.
YSK we’re a 50 person company and we absolutely verfify employment. What a dumb fucking post. I know plenty of other places that do.Did not read very well…
I think you need to read the post again
I really need to stop posting stoned…
On the other hand, having a one year gap without any work raises its own red flags. Need a good reason to have large swaths of not working.
This one is so crazy to me. I have two friends that seem to be facing this issue right now. One took 6 months off after being laid off from his job because he wanted to, had enough money to, and just wanted to take some time off and travel etc. He keeps getting grilled about it, and has been job hunting for another 6 months on top of it. Now he’s been unemployed for a year and is getting grilled even harder for it. Why is that a problem? Like why do people see that as some kind of flaw? “I had the resources to take some time off so I did” seems perfectly fine to me
The other friend was suffering from severe burnout and decided to take a year off to get his own mental health in order. Once again, I don’t see the problem with that. If you can afford to take a year off and that’s what you want to do with your time and money, then right on, go do that. Life is for living. But now he’s having a very hard time getting a job because of it.
Its kinda bullshit.
Decided to take a break from the capitalist system.
Indeed thankfully for us, covid which can reasonably span from 2020-2022 but yeah true.
I have hired dozens, maybe hundreds of people in corpo jobs. I can’t vouch for any other employer, but I’ve never called anybody for anything. We had tests to verify skills and the CV was mostly a tool to know what steps to cover during an interview.
I can confirm that I didn’t care about the summer you spent flipping burgers for the much more specific, entirely unrelated jobs I hired for. It mostly only let me know it was probably somebody young and relatively inexperienced padding things out.
But then, we were hiring for a very specific type of industry and… well, we weren’t assholes. I have to imagine this sort of CV micromanagement is a thing somewhere or there wouldn’t be a cottage industry around this nonsense.
Last two places I worked we used HireRight to run background checks on all new hires. I have my own document. I worked in Cyber; one company was data analytics, the other was finance.
The service will take the information you submitted at application and verifiy if it is true. They literally call former employers and the schools you list (college only). They run a public records check and when its all done, it goes to the HR goons. I never saw the reports except my own. Each one costs about $600. There are always some minor discrepancies, the company will add a note; if there are little ones, they will note and advise that there is nothing concerning. I never had one come back bad. A different leader did, and it just means that they have a conversation with the candidate and let them explain.
On mine, I had some criminal history hits for a different person with the same name as me. They were in states where I did not live and it was pretty clear it was someone else. They also did a credit report.
So they are real and they do happen. They are VERY thorough. They are also expensive and most places dont want to pay for them. I had it done as I was a senior director in cyber security. I doubt all parts of the workforce have it done.
I can see that for a security role… maybe. It would have been a massive waste of time and money for what we were doing, though. Plus, this was during the good old times when people weren’t being fired left and right. If anything it was hard to find people with the right qualifications that were still available. People in the field were getting hired directly out of school. If you could pass the tests, do the job and not act like a psychopath during interviews there were very few things that would have disqualified you.
I’ll also say that I’m pretty sure some of what you describe would have been illegal over here, at least for most jobs.
Can confirm. Worked nearly a dozen years for the same company straight out of high school, and have not had a single employer since verify my work history or references. This is to say, that my first employer with whom I had a good rapport and good reviews, has not received a single phone call or e-mail in this regard. I still talk with & see them on a semi-regular basis, and asked them - not one, not one single effort has been made to contact them and verify the contents of my resume concerning my time spent in their employ.
Me @ Human Resources departments everywhere:
If you get any amount of work from recruiters they always call your references and/or your past jobs.
I’ve given a handful of people permission to use me as a reference and every single time, that person goes hunting and will work with 2-5 recruiters over the course of their job hunt and from each and every one I’ll get a 20 minute call where they grill me about the candidate. It’s kinda exhausting as somebody who isn’t in charge of hiring/firing.
Nothing hurts your resume more than having 3 or 4 jobs in a span of 2 years because it shows you are unreliable.
I’d like to add that if you put start/end dates on your work history you should prepare talking points for any gaps this may leave when omitting jobs.
Most employers in my experience want the detail of what you were doing. They don’t like 2 year blanks.
Having multiple jobs in a few years doesn’t show you are unreliable at all. There could be a number of reasons (short contracts, change of ownership, company closing, moving house, having kids, conditions changing) that forced your move.
I’ve got jobs in the past because my CV showed I was able and willing to take jobs when opportunities came my way.
You might be surprised… https://employees.theworknumber.com/
Many employers report your employment info to data brokers. Request your data and see for yourself.
Good advice, but it depends. Some people don’t want to show a gap in their resume, for any reason. It all depends on the story you want to tell. If you think the experience is directly relevant to the story you are looking to tell, put it in.
Did you do some temp work in your field for few months between full-time gigs? Probably best to include that, especially if you learned or applied relevant skills. Did you end up working in a different field to make ends meet instead? Probably best to leave that out, unless you can relate that unrelated experience to what you want to do now.
This depends on where you live. In my country Employers will only (sometimes, not always) call previous companies if you specifically list them as references.
Just get the dates right, down to the month. Beyond that, you can make just about everything else up and since most employers don’t want to foot the bill for actual due diligence, your interview performance is what matters next-most.
Change your job titles to whatever fits the job you’re aiming to get now(remember you’ll actually need to interview for and do the job if you get it, so consider inflating only about 1 level of seniority upward).
You can add unverifiable resume items to explain gaps, such as a side gig or volunteer experience or family event.
You can make up 90% of the bullet points under each experience item too, which will increase net job search performance by 28% on average and 122% of hiring managers won’t read them or will read them and not ask about them anyway.
If you think companies are going to keep your data and blacklist you, then you just need to formally request your complete PII file under applicable data privacy laws such as GDPR or CCPA. If they did keep your data, the same laws can be used to make them delete it entirely (assuming you’re not also their customer, in which case they’ll have permissible reasons to keep it until you discontinue your subscription).
… since most employers don’t want to foot the bill for actual due diligence …
Employers in the US can be liable for damages if they communicate inaccurate information about a former (or current, I imagine) employee’s performance if that communication negatively affects the former employee’s hirability.
Unless your former employer has detailed and contemporaneous records of your work history and reason for termination, and they’re willing to risk being taken to court over telling those to your potential future employer, they’re going to confirm hire and term dates, and nothing more. Everywhere I’ve ever worked has been like that; “If someone calls to check on employment history, you tell them hire/term dates and nothing more.”
I made a typo for one of my employment dates while filing the background check. Caught it right after submitting it and then asked around and everybody told me that they’ll call and ask about it if they can’t figure it out from just looking back at my resume.
Next morning they called me and said they had to close the role because of budget cuts. Two months later I got an email saying my hiring was being paused because my background check was flagged and I had 10 days from the check to dispute it. I decided to call the company and they told me that they had already hired someone else for the role.
So yeah, getting the dates right can be important.
