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.

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.

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:

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.

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....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.