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.
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?”
Tracking smartphone users is a billion dollar industry, and it’s not that hard to figure out where a user is working if you have their location data and a million other data points from their phone usage. That doesn’t necessarily mean that this data is easily accessible to every employer, but it’s absolutely possible to know someone’s work history with reasonable certainty without government databases.
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.
“I was providing end of life care for a family member.”
You get benefits for that (in some places), and why would you not list that on the resume ahead of time to explain the gap?
Omitting Information is the largest red flag you can provide.
Because resumes are for listing relevant work experience not a timeline of your life events.
Being a caregiver is relevant work experience, quite sad that some people think caring for others isn’t relevant for a large portion of work…
Talk about not trying to sell yourself wow. If shows a whole bunch of characteristics that are known for employability. Wild you wouldn’t want to show that you don’t mind putting others first, can work in a steel environment, caring, works well with others, etc.
Caring for a family member would have no relevance to just as many, if not more, positions than it holds relevance to.
Like any tech related position beyond (at quite a stretch) helpdesk, not relevant.
There’s something to be said for character reference in your resume, but most places are more concerned about more tangible skills.
Like another commenter suggested, maybe under an “other experience” section, but not in the same area as relevant work experience unless you’re trying to pad things.
Caring for a family member (caregiving isn’t actually just limited to family members FYi) includes but not limited; dealing with financing, scheduling, transit, meal planning and prep, etc. you’re the persons care taker, you do everything they would normally be doing. There’s every day tasks that are relevant to every job that’s out there. There’s a reason why people can’t hold jobs while being a caretaker after all… or does this mean absolutely nothing to people?
Tell me you think being a caretaker means sitting around doing nothing all day….
You aren’t thinking like a hiring manager.
Being a caregiver is relevant work experience if the job you’re applying to is for caregiving, or at least something semi-related like the medical field.
But if you’re applying for programming or sales positions it’s entirely irrelevant.
Dealing with finances, scheduling, planning and transit aren’t relevant to a sales position? That’s an interesting take.
Do you not realize what being a caregiver involves?
I wouldn’t list it because it’s in a section that is titled “Work Experience” not my life journal. I even personally call mine “Relevant Experience” and note to please reach out if you’d like to see more, out of respect for their time. My full experience would take up like five pages of resume with everything else. Besides, to me the point of the resume is to get to that phone call, and after that I figure I can talk to anything they’d like to know.
Man I wish I lived in a place that had benefits like that.
Being a caregiver is its own work experience, you should list it. How is it any different than the paid jobs that do the same thing?
It also shows your willing to put your own stuff aside and help.
I guess if you’re just using this as a lie, you wouldn’t realize all the actual benefits something like this could do for your resume.
Sure but being a caregiver doesn’t help explain why you’d be good for a software engineering role, or whatever.
Actually, caring for others, is quite a relevant work trait for even software engineering. Don’t want a bunch of people who can’t handle communicating with others or can’t get someone to do something.
It’s all I how you spin it, and clearly you aren’t using this for anything but a lie if you think it’s not valid work experience.
We get it, you were a caregiver. Good job.
Sheesh, I must have missed the memo where caretaking a family member required making it your entire personality. Hope you and your family member are doing ok.
As a team lead who is in the process of hiring for three separate positions, I would treat any applicant who insisted on the transferability of their clearly unrelated skills as a “not a good fit” candidate. I get the importance of soft skills, and I value those, but to maintain that a caretaker can seamlessly fit into basically any job role with just a little imagination is disingenuous and a little embarrassing. I’m looking for concrete skills, not spin. By all means, put your best foot forward, just don’t wear clown shoes while you do it.
I work in the medical field, and everything you are saying is complete nonsense. If you’re applying for medical school or nursing school or something, talking about that experience can be part of a personal statement or entrance essay, but it has no place on a CV or resume. To a certain extent, taking care of loved ones should be a basic requirement for being human, not a special experience or qualification for any kind of job.
Tell that to the AI that processes 1000 resumes a day filtering ones that seem more “at risk” or “less professional” than others
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So if you’re keeping off any jobs that you’ve worked at for less than 2 years, does that mean you lie about dates to cover up the gaps?
I wouldn’t lie about dates. If they end up speaking to that company, it wouldn’t be surprising for them to be mentioned. The second they find you lying about information, they’ll pass on you as a candidate
Right, so leaving jobs off your resume is probably not a good idea. Year-long gaps in your employment history will get you passed on, as well.
Sorry, I misread your original comment as an actual question about whether or not one should fudge dates
You might be surprised… https://employees.theworknumber.com/
Many employers report your employment info to data brokers. Request your data and see for yourself.
Super permanent record bro…
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.
I don’t agree. I think having a mix of long and short term is not problamatic. The hardest thing is getting that first long term one.
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.
