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 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.
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…
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.
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.
This also depends on the country and the industry. For many American jobs these days, your previous employer might be opening themselves up to a lawsuit if they said anything bad about you, so many companies now will at most identify the duration of your employment and your job title but nothing else.
The point is not that a former employee would necessarily win a lawsuit, but they could bring one and the legal bills alone would be significant, therefore many company lawyers will say to just shut the hell up when asked any questions about performance.
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.
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.
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.
The data could in many cases be strong evidence someone worked somewhere, but the corollary isn’t true. A lack of data doesn’t prove someone didn’t work there, which makes this technique not very useful for some percentage of the population which makes the whole technique inconclusive
The thing is, they don’t need irrefutable evidence to toss out your resume, or at least be suspicious enough about it to ask you what you did in a given period; and if they already paid for this data, they might as well verify your answer as well.
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 stressful environment, caring, works well with others, etc. m
There’s also money involved, transit, you can always find something relevant in caregiving to any potential career.
Or do you think caregiving is just sitting around all day doing nothing?
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….
Please get off your high horse and stop making assumptions. I’ve literally laid four eldery family members in the ground over the past 3 years. For some reason I’m always asked to be a pallbearer and I’m never going to say no.
All of them required care. While my wife and I weren’t full time caregivers (living 8 hours away will do that), we’ve done more than enough time in the trenches. Nearly all our time off from work from 2018-2022 went into help and care for elderly relatives. Everything beyond our own days off sick or for Dr’s appointments. Weeks at a time of giving round the clock care. It only stopped once stable care had been sorted out and we decided to start IVF (with the blessing of those family members still able to communicate so) to try and have a kid.
I’ve also been minorly involved in a few hirings. Not directly making the decision, but part of the “meet your potential co-workers” interview. Talked extensively with my boss about the approach, and read up quite a bit about the process. My feedback was part of the decision.
Your points are valid, to a point. Caregivers do tend to underestimate the work involved, and the skills required. It can be, and quite often is, some of the hardest work out there to navigate all the shit involved while watching a loved one slowly die. It changes you.
Edit: and yes, I know caregivjng is not always related to loved ones, elderly, end of life, pallative, etc.
But I would still caution against listing it as direct job experience. Again, I would suggest listing it under an “Other Experience” section with any other skills from volunteering or personal life if they are particularly significant.
Resumes are all about making a good first impression, and there are tons of people out there who would see “Full time caregiver” and mentally file it the same as if someone listed “Stay at home parent”. I mean they would view it as an excuse and a cop out. It’s not necessarily fair, but I’m trying to be realistic here.
does this mean absolutely nothing to people?
Yes, this exactly. Anyone who hasn’t had direct exposure to the mechanics of elder care isn’t going to get it. That’s not a smart gamble to make on a first impression when job hunting unless you absolutely have to go all in on that gamble.
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?
You aren’t thinking like a hiring manager.
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.
Tell that to the AI that processes 1000 resumes a day filtering ones that seem more “at risk” or “less professional” than others
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.
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.
They want you to need them. If you don’t need them, you might be thinking independently. You might not go along with it when they want you to do unreasonable things.
It also takes resources to onboard a new employee and you don’t want to spend that on someone who is gonna bounce in six months.
Decided to take a break from the capitalist system.
Indeed thankfully for us, covid which can reasonably span from 2020-2022 but yeah true.
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.
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.
This is highly industry-dependent. When I was working in IT and systems admin, I had a lot of contract/temp jobs that were still valuable experiences. My resume after finishing university would have been blank if I left those 3-6 month contracts off because that’s how you get your foot in the door in a lot of fields.
Oh for those really short contracts I just make dates up. I can never remember when I started and finished. I just look at the calendar and make sure I started on a Monday and finished on a Friday and it’s roughly within the right time range. Never been called out on it.
I put month and year for start and end dates and keep my CV updated regularly.
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.
Yeah, I have 3x short entries on my resume for the same job. Company changed owners and name, then the company that contracted us hired me directly.
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.
