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.
I know this is true for most employers, but I’m not sure I’d be willing to be confident that there’s no way for any company to know. I’ve heard more than one report of companies that sell that sort of information to certain partners.
Thanks! You can and should ask equifax to freeze your work number.
There is no law or rule or anything that says you have to list all jobs. Leaving off jobs that don’t matter makes the resume easier to read. And if rhey do somehow find out and ask, you will know they are pretty meticulous.
The only way to know where you worked is really via tax documents. Unless the company has access to government databased they aren’t able to verify anything.
There isn’t really any data that can prove you worked somewhere other than tax info.
Word-of-mouth is a thing.
“Hey Sackeshi, didn’t I hear that you were working over at ABC Corp last year? I’m curious why you chose to leave that off of your resume?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
You might be surprised… https://employees.theworknumber.com/
Many employers report your employment info to data brokers. Request your data and see for yourself.
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).
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.
