askchapo

The general rule to follow is don't lie about anything that they can verify. Actually don't lie at all, just think of yourself as having permission to exaggerate. Really the whole game is about exaggerating without outright lying. But to go back to your question, licensure, education, and employment dates are concrete facts that can be verified with a background/reference check, so in your case, you might have to be honest on your resume, but you can probably give some vague reason for why your employment there ended like "the direction of the company changed and I became redundant", or just say "health reasons, but I'm good now and ready to get back in the workforce", they won't probe further if you say it was for health out of fear of a lawsuit.

Something I would be comfortable exaggerating is experience with specific skills/tools. For example the last time I used Java was almost a decade ago, and it was only for college projects, nothing professional, so as you can imagine I'm an idiot compared to an actual professional Java programmer, but I'll put it on anyways (if it's listed in the job posting). It will improve the chances they'll give you an interview, and they might not even ask about it all, and if they do, it might not be a huge deal that you only have nominal experience with it.

If you're in tech, just fill in your gaps with failed startups.

Bullshitting about freelance projects with NDAs can be pretty good depending on your field.

Who says lie on your resume? Lying about anything that's verifiable sounds like a bad idea. If the place you're applying to checks your past employer and the dates are wildly off, you're probably not going to get the job. If you lie and say you know how to do something and it's obvious you don't on the interview, that's also a bad time.

Most "lying" on resumes I've seen is like transforming "I used pytest" into "Wrote comprehensive testing framework[1] that integrated disparate cutting edge technologies[2]. Delivered xx% coverage[3] , eliminated cross-test contamination[4], and generated coverage reports[5] to guide the team in areas needing attention "

1. Adding some text fixtures isn't really a framework nor is it comprehensive, but close enough
2. It plugs into postgres and Django out of the box. What's written is arguably true though
3. Really the team delivered it, but take credit.
4. A plug-in does this for free, but take credit for installing it
5. A different plug-in does this also for free, and another posts it on GitHub for free. But take credit.

So you can see there's a lot of fluff, but that's different than like "I worked at Facebook" when you did not in fact work there. Or saying you know JavaScript because you installed ublock once.