I’ve given a lot of thought to my previous post which was inspired by NYTimes job section article last Sunday. The writer, I believe a professional career counselor, said that people laid off should tell prospective employers that they were laid off and also believed that everyone should put their year of college graduation on their resume (contrary to what a lot of employees in their 50′s and 60′s would like to do.
1. Should you say you were laid-off (or whatever terminology you want to use)?
I think a good rule of thumb here is that if your company will allow you to say you are still employed (ask them, many will allow this for a period of time, especially if you were a valued employee and this lay off was no fault of your own). In that case you can put to present on your resume but once you start interviewing you need to say that “the company will be downsizing soon”, “I’m going to take a package”, “the company may go out of business so I’m proactively looking”–it should be the truth. this way you can avoid getting caught in the “I don’t want to look at people who have been laid-off” pile.
I also suggest that you do not look at this as an opportunity to take some time off, have a good time. The longer you are out of work, the harder it is the find a job–and the “laid Off” discrimination will increase.
2. Not putting all your jobs on your resume and eliminating your college graduation year.
I sometimes will get a resume that starts in 1990 with a Director Level position and no graduation date. I immediately know that this person is omitting information from their resume. HR departments do not like this and many companies perform background checks–this can be construed as lying.
Here’s a perfectly acceptable way to handle this: before your 1990 Director Level job: put in a paragraph that says something like this: prior to 1990 i worked in a series of progressive positions at: blah blah, blah, blah. In other words account for the time between college and the last position but don’t go into great detail. It was a long time ago, probably not relevant–but it’s not okay to start your resume mid-stream without some acknowledgment that you worked for 15 years before that.
And for what it’s worth, I’d put my college graduation date.
