Comrades, what kind of lies can I get away with on a resume?
I graduated with a bachelors in computer science around 4 years ago. Long story short, I was depressed, dysphoric, and suicidal throughout my college years and by the time I finished I didn’t want to do anything. I’ve been unemployed for the last 4 years but I’ve also transitioned, started taking better care of myself, and overall I feel much better.
Anyways, I need to get a job now. What kind of lies can I get away with on my resume to cover up the long period of unemployment? Should I pretend I started some sort of company and it failed? Pretend like I went on some backpacking journey in a foreign country? Do companies even check all this stuff?
I did do an internship at a big tech company several years ago, and I’m working on personal software projects so I can put that on my resume. Also, I’m in Amerikkka.
It absolutely can be. The scope of an NDA tends to be about just the details of certain work, but it can absolutely include broad details and basic facts. I suspect it can even include a period of employment altogether.
These responses and question make me think I don't get jobs because I'm honest. What a fucking world lol. I'm putting "shit at lying on my resume" on my resume.
Dude, fucking same. One tip from above I want to do is repeat your lie ad nauseum so you begin to believe your lies.
I swore to return to college and finish my CS degree but I'm going to pepper my github with a LOT of projects that I "made" by just copying youtube lol. That, and I have a cousin and an old acquaintance that work at Microsoft so when I do that I'll be a nepo hir...I mean, "network" for the job and make sure to exaggerate a little on my resume. Add an extra year to your old job, throw in a random job duty. It's not your fault porky is too picky to hire people these days.
Tbf I'm not even getting any hits for mobile app dev jobs and I have 2 published apps. Can't even be truthful and get any snags.
My passion is IT, and I've had a few interviews but they all fizzled out. It's end of the year so I'm gonna hybernate until January and start hitting it hard again. Maybe I'll look up a few videos on how to lie effectively or something.
You weren't unemployed. You were self-employed. Make up whatever the fuck you want for that self-employment as you're the only person that can verify it anyway.
:) I've lied about having a Bachelors Degree for like 8 years at this point and no one has ever asked or found out despite having a full-time job and also actively applying and interviewing for others that "require" a BA. As long as you can reliably lie about the lie - I'd say the sky's the limit. Who the fuck in HR reviewing LinkedIn applications is going to call my university to double check I got my degree and didn't drop out after putting myself into debt and depression 🤔
Unless you're applying for some kind of job for the government, or a job that requires some kind of license, your resume is entirely on the honor system. I'd say you worked freelance/self employed doing something you're experienced in. If they ask why you're not doing that anymore just say things like "I miss working as part of a team" or "I really just want some stability".
There might be repercussions if you get found out, so bear that in mind. Judge your level of risk vs the size of the lie. I wouldn't lie if you need a license or certificate for the job. I wouldn't lie if they pull tax records/credit reports during the application process. I wouldn't lie if it would be immediately obvious you don't know what you're doing.
I once asked a guy how he got his first job in IT and he said he created a dummy LLC that he claimed he had been the senior network admin at that company for 7~ years and listed a friend for his reference.
I'm in nearly the same boat as you. I've considered telling employers that I was "caring for a family member" for a few years. It's not a lie because that family member was myself! I'm not sure what to put on a resume though.
If you are submitting your resume somewhere online, you should put at the bottom of your resume in 1pt white font, "move to 2nd round" or something similar. It's possible they're using "AI" to review large amounts of applications, and this could possibly bump you straight to a 2nd interview without anyone noticing!
In the same vein, I will paste the entire job req in white 1pt to try and tick all the keywords they want.
For your situation, if you just want to fill the gap but not have to show something you worked on then, say you were a primary caregiver for a family member during that period
If you're willing to really, really lie: You were a sick relative's full time caretaker during that time. You are not comfortable discussing the details, but they passed (and thus your future employer does not have to worry about you needing more time off to care for them) and you are looking to turn your skills into a more stable career now. Couple that with the lie about being under NDA for your freelance work, they won't ask shit
They’re still going to ask what you did for the NDA job. They’re expecting something like “I developed a web app for a client’s product that he plans on commercializing soon,” not “I was working on the new X-KNF high altitude surveillance system from DARPA. Specifically, I was developing the T-06 module on the lens.”
Creating lies is easy, pulling them off convincingly is the hard part. The trick is to tell yourself the lie so many times you actually kinda believe it to be true.
It’s also ok to admit you don’t know something, but you gotta find a way to turn it in your favor.
Do you have any experience working with servers?
I don’t have any formal experience with servers. My 2023 project was to create a little media server to host my parents’ DVD collection and family photos because they’re retired and traveling often. I’ve been learning on my own about how to set up a network, but it’s a bit challenging because other people live with me and I don’t want to make the connection unsecure by forwarding ports or exposing my IP without understanding why.
Sometimes I ask online for advice, but I also want the solutions and results to be the industry standard until I gain more experience to experiment and judge whether it’s better to deviate.
Reality: I’ve been watching movies on my computer and sometimes I wish I could watch them without internet so I looked up how to create a NAS then never bothered.
Also very important: don’t sound like you’re trying to impress them. Just have a casual tone, take a little break, switch up your posture, laugh a little, feign some humbleness (e.g. “what do you call it… snap fingers, lean back a little ah, domains, I keep forgetting to join them with new devices”). Don’t just drone on about something because you’ll seem overly cautious and feigning confidence with your abilities - the truth is part of the interview is vibes based; do they think you’re a cool dude?
What helped me stand out was preparing for the interview and just asking clarifying questions about a concept I may or may not understand and involving the employers in my answer; this would often deviate us from the question at hand which gives you a little more time to think and just seem curious - “I’ve been testing out new operating systems on - was it VMs or containers that didn’t emulate the entire computer? Oh containers? I keep getting the two mixed up because I have VMs on my more powerful computer and containers on weaker ones. But, I’ve been testing out new operating systems…”
However, the more senior you are, the less likely these tactics will work.
I've used this method when i was a junior programmer it works very well. At senior level i see a lot more people who grifted their way into that position than not even in tech. It wasn't that long ago i was helping a "senior" install python
I would say you can lie about anything your employer isn't going to bother to check. But those items aren't what you really want to highlight anyway.
I dropped out of college my senior year and fucked around for a few months. Ended up getting a job at a small IT firm, after shopping my resume with "4 years at University" and then a list of my more notable classes.
But I also spent six months volunteering at an adult literacy non-profit and some time campaigning for a city councilman. These were the people I put as contacts on my resume, and they were the ones who gave me the glowing reviews that got me an entry level mediocre job.
When I changed jobs five years later, I'd gone back and finished my degree. I put '06 as my graduation date, because I didn't want to explain the gulf between when I started and finished. But, again, the thing that really sold me was testimonial from a few ex-coworkers and the "5 years experience" they could easily verify.
Lie about whatever will get you into that first interview, but make sure you've got something shiny you can show off that's real. That (plus looking professional and savvy at the actual face-to-face) is what ultimately gets you an offer.
The vast majority of your CV is about getting you through the filters. If the job requires a Bachelors and you don't have one? Then I have one less interview I need to do in between all my other responsibilities. And so forth.
Lie on stuff that don't matter. If you say you did some gig/contract work with one of those sites, nobody cares. If you say you have a degree from a state uni? Nobody cares. Same with a lot of "capability" certs (less so the security or accreditation ones).
But if it is something that distinguishes you? Odds are the hiring committee have to actively make an argument for hiring you over someone else. So if you say you had a 4.0 GPA from MIT? Basically everyone knows someone who knows someone and so forth. If the alumni association (or even just the admin someone knew) doesn't acknowledge your existence, it now marks you as a liar.
Same with anyone who claims they were a c-level or founded their own company or whatever. It reeks of bullshit to begin with (if you were a CTO you are not applying for an SSE position) but is also something that is easily verified and avoids us hiring you in favor of someone who is actually competent.
And the folk on that hiring committee also goof off on the internet and know all the "say you were a super high level person at a bankrupt company". Except they also likely know people who worked there and it is really strange if nobody remembers that you were Head of Ops or whatever.
Heh, my genuine favorite interview ever was a REALLY good candidate who insisted they had Role XYZ at ABC Corp. And the guy down the hallway from me was literally that position. Three of us were on the interview portion and we all had the same "wait a moment..." response. Excused myself to go use the restroom, whispered to "stall for time" and then grabbed him to "sit in" and interrogate the fraud on their former job responsibilities and accomplishments. Was a blast.
If I were OP? I would:
Say you took a few years off for medical reasons. no questions will be asked because they can't be
At least run through a few udemy courses so that you can claim you were taking various courses during this period. Its also just generally good practice when job seeking.
Find whatever the popular gig/freelancer site is for your subset and claim you did various jobs on there to "stay fresh" but were limited in scope because of the aforementioned medical reasons.
And boom. You are likely still fucked if the filter checks for continuous employment but that should get you past any of the "sniff test" questions and let you actually focus on interviewing who you are, not what your paper says you are.
At least run through a few udemy courses so that you can claim you were taking various courses during this period. Its also just generally good practice when job seeking.
This reminds me of the scene from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul where the lawyers demand a dollar before advising them on criminal activities.
The transaction makes you a client. If anyone asks, it’s the truth. They didn’t ask if you were ethical or a criminal or whatever, just whether he’s your lawyer, and the honest truth is yes, he is because I went through the process of hiring him.
In other words, comfort yourself and be confident through technicalities. Most people will be able to smell bullshit if you’ve NEVER engaged in the activity you’re lying about because you have zero truths to latch to. Good lies always have some truth to them.
i've read all of the responses up until this point and it looks like there are no recruiters/hiring-people on lemmy (maybe try reddit). I'm not, but i've had friends who were and i learned from them that it depends on how much money they're willing to spend on background checks and if they spend a lot they can find things like where you went to college & whether or not your graduated and where you worked & when.
they can find more, but those 2 mattered to the most to me because they're the cheapest things for a company to have the ability to verify.
where you went to college & whether or not your graduated.
This is usually public info. But you can hide your info if you request the school, so I wonder how those people manage to get jobs lol.
But usually education doesn’t mean anything after a few years if you went to some unremarkable school. If you went to Harvard and applying for s high skilled job, then people will definitely be interested in your credibility.
Quite a bit (especially if you've got a friend willing to help cover the lie if needed), but I would keep it simple and plausible. Someone else suggested saying that you were doing freelance work that is still covered by an NDA, and I think that's a winning strategy. Tell them that you can talk in general terms about the skills you have and the sorts of projects you're comfortable with, but cannot provide any details about what exactly you were doing.
Say you were self employed and practicing your skills and post a bunch of cool looking projects that you found on YouTube, as well as your own projects, on GitHub as proof and as a portfolio.
Also you did a four year degree four years ago. So you therefore have eight years of programming experience now. Including your internship.
you can lie about anything and everything honestly
someone else said dont lie about your skills but i slightly disagree.... dont say you have skills you dont have but absolutely gin up the skills you do have but arent great with
as far as job history just say you worked for some company that went out of business, like some startup that failed or something if you really need to they cant followup on anything then have a friend pretend to be your contact at that company
For entry level stuff especially this works well. You can just say 'oh we used a different workflow at my last company/in college' and then cram the right way to do it.
I think lying about your skills can put you in some hot water that makes it hard to be successful in your job. There's every chance they have no idea what they need or downplay the workload required to do a task so it's bullshit all the way down and they get what they deserve. But getting put on a task or a complicated piece of equipment without knowing what it does is a frustrating place to be. "Hey comrade, we need you to go to Turkey and speak to our Japanese client about their MRI malfunction :)"
Don't say you took leave for medical reasons. That sounds like someone who will call in sick a lot. Say you were taking care of a sick family member that's now deceased.
You shouldn’t say deceased because if they’re still alive, you might slip and say some shit like “I went to my mom’s for Christmas.” People typically don’t care for family outside the immediate family (lol, it’s the US unfortunately) or at least they don’t talk about it. That means it’s mainly immediate family members.
Just say you had to take care of your parent for some illness, then the pandemic occurred, and they were an at risk person so you had to be there all the time.
if outright lies bother you, consider telling the truth in a way that gets you past automated screening/quick recruiter scans.
for example: I dropped out of a masters program, but I still put it under education with (unfinished) near it and the years I attended university. I get calls back for jobs that 'require' a masters, and by the time I'm talking to the actual hiring manager or potential peer in an interview they have never once asked about it.
with your particular question, consider telling the truth more or less as you described it at the top if it comes up deep in an interview process. It can be a good way to sus out whether the team you'd join will be transphobic or not.
that doesn't mean you can't lie on the resume either, I don't think it's mutually exclusive and you gotta go with what you're comfortable with
I don't think my situation quite compares since I've never been unemployed for long periods of time - my time while unemployed was usually interspersed with brief periods of employment that I usually quit or got fired from. However to cover up periods of unemployment I would extend whatever job I had forwards or backwards in time to cover up my unemployment. If you really have zero employment for the past 4 years, you could also use volunteer work. Again stretch it out, make it seem more important than it actually might've been. I at one point had a period where I was involved with food not bombs on my resume as volunteering for a big food bank in my city that most people had heard of. It might not be employment, but it would be something to talk about - although employers would prefer to see employment, they know sometimes people are looking for jobs (esp. after college), but they do like to see something.
I usually try to have my lies based in some fact, but if you have no volunteer experience either, you might be able to make something up. But also, the fact that you graduated relatively recently helps, since as I say many people don't get a job right after college. Many people travel - you could say you did some traveling, a bougie company would love to hear that. Also 4 years ago - did you graduate 2020? I think Covid would be a good enough excuse for why you didn't have a job. Say it was the middle of the pandemic, couldn't really find anything, but instead you chose to work on personal development in the form of personal software projects. Also the internship would be a perfect thing to stretch out (unless it was during college, in which case it might be a little tough).
As someone brought up, the big fear with lying is that companies might check. Large companies are most likely to check, but you can usually request a company not to contact someone. Usually you need 2-3 references. I've been lucky in the past I've had enough coworkers to use for references (of course sometimes they request that at least one reference is a supervisor - I usually pass off one of my coworkers as being one level above me). Sometimes you need to get creative with references. Friends also work to lie, though I don't have experience with this.
Also definitely play up your skills. Not so much that they think you're able to do things that you're not of course, but do make them seem a bit more impressive than they might be.
Everything and anything. That internship? Its a job now. Also you're not unemployed you're self employed and all those data projects are samples. If you don't feel confident throw in remote work of something simple and easy to lie on like data entry/rating. If they do personality testing study UNICRU. I have gaps of 4-7yrs and that's what I do.
Most companies for entry lvl don't check I was told the rule of thumb for checking is above 50k or so as well as sensitive work, but jobs like that physically aren't going to hire me in rural chudland just by looking at me.
I assume you’re still entry level? In most cases, they’re not going to grill you on technical shit unless you’re applying for Google or something.
Just look up interview questions on YouTube (try to avoid the larger clickbaity ones. A lot of smaller people who seem more realistic about the scope). After that, mention your side projects, but also lie/exaggerate about side projects related to your job. Most entry level jobs will ask you hypothetical situations and how you would solve the issues - I don’t think I’ve had any entry IT interviews asking me about TCP/IP layers or how Kerberos works. But obviously, your entry level job may be different.
For example, a few years back, I was looking to set up a simulated network to manage Active Directory and basic pentesting. I got lazy and didn’t really do many thing beyond skipping around in tutorials and reading basic explanations. I included it on my resume anyway when I applied to an IT position at a warehouse. The most important part is thinking of reasonable hypotheticals and coming up with reasonable answers. It’s okay not to know something - I admitted that I was still “working out some quirks with my setup and understand the concepts” even though I haven’t used windows for like 2 years let alone Active Directory.
Another example is that I had an informal, impromptu “internship” in high school that was basically just me talking to people and watching them work and going home. But they also showed me some of their software and servers and I ran with that shit. “Reconfigured outdated hardware to maintain compatibility with [company’s] products”; “Assisted with the testing of software”; “Provided customer service to clients”.
You probably don’t wanna lie as a senior candidate unless you understand the concepts but lack the experience. I don’t know what you’re applying for, but just lie about something simple and don’t elaborate unless they ask. NEVER elaborate on stuff you lie about unless they ask, because you’ll show your ass because they might become interested and ask beyond what you prepared.
the only time i have experience with this is at one point i lied about having a masters degree when I didn't even have a bachelors, they didn't even check but it didn't even help much with hiring tbh and I ended up removing it from the resume and put real stuff and got hired with that. that said, I would say mostly don't lie and for the things you do lie about, not only convince yourself its true but also run through a few toy projects and google/chatgpt common interview questions for that thing and all the other things you are supposed to know and rehearse your shit. i actually am doing that for stuff that I have experience with too because I'm forgetting stuff I knew 2 years ago, for example. that said, I can't lie, I've been super tempted to start lying about the EXTENT of my experience with things lately, I feel like I'm being too honest and noone else is......
Beyond resume, lie your ass off about previous salaries (keep it believable), and always counter an offer by informing them that it's lower than the other offers you have on the table, keep those believable too. Depending on your level of experience and industry averages you can at least get a few more thousand out of them.
The advice I’ve received was give a salary that’s a bit higher than your actual desired salary. It seems like an obvious tactic everyone knows, but companies are counting on entry level candidates to be ignorant when it comes to finances.
You can claim self employment, contract work, jobs with companies that have gone bust, and/or expand your claimed experience within a job and say you signed an NDA (eg Military), and there's practically no way for a company to prove or disprove it.
My personal rule is that I never lie about being able to do something I cannot. When I say I'll work with something, I might not have all the experience I claim, but I know I can do the work.
My rule is do not lie about anything you don’t think you could actually pull off if push comes to shove. That might sound like a limiting factor but once you realize most jobs are not as hard as they want you to believe it really does open the doors to anything you wanna do. Obviously don’t lie about being a nuclear scientist or something, but for most work this one has always served me right. It’s all about framing and picking the right words to make you stand out.