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Ask HN: At what point should you stop resume-padding unemployment time?

9 points by djellybeans ↗ HN
I had a contract that ended in late 2019 and that was the last job I've worked. My current resume still shows my freelance experience as ongoing, with the date range of "2015 to present". At what point should I just cut it off and be blunt with my experience, and tell people I have not worked since 2019?

I'm sure this puts an interesting spin after COVID and that certainly had created obstacles (job openings I applied to have closed mid-interviews). But is it safer today, a full two years later after my contract ended, to just tell on my resume my last job was two years ago?

I would like to not scare people reading my resume, but I also do not want to cause people to ask, why is the section so short for 6 years of time. Seems very hard to avoid both issues at the same time.

9 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 33.6 ms ] thread
yuppie_scum
My feeling: put an end date if you ended one more or year ago.
readonthegoapp
tldr; don't make them ask; list some projects/work.

i can't fully understand part of your question, so i'll just riff a bit.

i'm braindead from zoomviewing all day. and dealing with aggravations that come with that.

i had one recruiter say today, "Is that unix, like U. N. I. X.?"

only mattered cause i thought i was talking to someone who'd been in the game for more than a day.

my next talk was with a tech founder of a streaming sql company, so at least i didn't have to deal that type of thing again.

my newly re-learned insights from this round of 6+ weeks of intensive interviewing are:

  - have a story. what's the arc of your
    'career'/employment/etc.? wtf _are_ you? 
    what do you _do_? what _can_ you do? what 
    do you _want_ to do?

  - be able to tell that story in 30 
    seconds or less. 45 tops.

  - know what you like about the job or 
    company you're applying to. or 
    pretending to like. that's at the 
    tail end of your story. as some 
    hiring mgr said today, "Why are we 
    here today?" Fuckin a -- i wish i 
    got more questions like that. we 
    could get shit done real quick.

  - list any freelancing projects you can - 
    at least super-high level. this will 
    show you're not a lazy piece of shit. 
    not depressed. not ill in some other 
    way. etc. i.e. capable and willing to 
    do a 9 to 5.
like, you're gonna run across the gamut of people -- people who don't give a _shit_ that you're a failed wantrepreneur (or whatever you've been doing), and may even appreciate it, and people who can't stand you for it and will ask you some asinine question like, "There'a gap on your resume from v, x to y, z -- what were you doing during that time?"

bro, i literally can't remember what i did yesterday, much less 10 years ago, tf is wrong with you?

so, to me, resume-padding is just white-lying -- it's a social lubricant to get us through this hellscape called 'hiring'.

so, at what point should you stop resume-padding unemployment time?

at the point where have sufficiently removed the possibility of piquing the interest of a recruiter/hiring manager to the point where they have to ask you about it -- which serves nobody.

i've switched back and forth from telling my full employment story from the past two amazingly-shitty-for-me years -- a 2-year contract that ended after 9 months (thanks, Covid, but i was happy at first -- boring job), then a 3-month full time job i quit because i hated it. depending on the day or week, i've left out the 3-month gig -- it can be meaningful that I bounced, but eh -- if i wasn't completely miserable, i probably would have stayed for god knows how long.

good luck!

questiondev
after reading your response, we’ll thought of by the way i mean that, i finally have an answer for the op, jobs really only care about the last 4 to 6 years of your work experience, get those in however you can from this point on and whatever you had to “pad” before those 4-6 won’t matter. at the end of the day, a company wants you to like them, they want a can do attitude and enough sense to figure shit out without being too annoying
ssss11
I think it’s quite common to be upfront that you didn’t work for a period (date A to date B) but usually put a simple entry in for what you did do (if possible of course!)

E.g Feb 2019 - Nov 2019: travelling across Europe

Or Dec 2019 - Feb 2020: Taking a break with family

As the break is the last thing you did I’d try to show super enthusiasm to work again in any interaction with prospective hirers so it’s clear you do actually want to get back to work. Good luck

muzani
IMO padding in that sense is lying on the resume. It's grounds for instant rejection. They expect you to have 6 years of experience, but you have 4.

4 years is still substantial experience. And it was peak COVID period, so people tend to not even ask why - maybe this person is dealing with grief, divorce, mental issues, etc.

Also honesty is a rarer and more valuable trait than those extra two years.

bnchrch
Well here lies the crux of it:

If you tell a lie in the woods and no one hears it and calls you a liar…

You can also invert the above with truth instead of lie and get a similar realization.

Anyway, I’m sure you get the point.

bnchrch
People don’t care about years experience, or exact start and end dates on a resume.

The same way they don’t really care about if any of their top 5 candidates can do the job better than one another.

What they really care about is do they believe your competent enough and do they like you.

Their answer to those questions has nothing to do with if you took a break or not.

They do however rest on how good of a story you can tell them. So go and tell them the best story.

questiondev
i love this advice. i hope you are beyond blessed this week. not even trying to be awkward about this but, yeah you hit it on the read. 85 is personality
DrNuke
The hiring people may just want/need to know how you spent your “void” time for legal, security or safety reasons. They also need to understand if you can still function within a working environment: the dynamics, the pressure, etc. After that, you can tell them anything, provided that it can stand a possible background check.