YSK Employers do NOT verify your total work history unless you're applying for a government position.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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?

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).