I have a problem. I have spent the last 18 months unemployed. There is nothing on my CV more recent than 2008. And so when applying for jobs, a lot of employers will see this, assume I’m a work-shy slacker and bin my application.
They’re not completely wrong. For a good while I was only making a token effort to find a job and really wasn’t looking all that hard. But now I am genuinely trying to find a job, and I am wondering what to do to paper over the huge gap on my CV.
One possibility is to find some voluntary work. I have been looking into that recently, but I’m not sure that it’s going to be enough.
And so I’m wondering whether I should claim to have been self-employed in that time, as a musician. It wouldn’t be a complete lie. I have, in the past year, played some proper bookings and tomorrow a friend and I will be running a morris dancing workshop for which we will be getting paid. But it would definitely be stretching the truth.
Is this a really stupid idea? Will employers see through this ruse and prosecute me for fraud? Will they decide that trying unsuccessfully to make a living out of music is basically the same thing as being unemployed anyway? Or even that it’s worse? Or is this a good way to explain what I’ve been doing for the past eighteen months without having to make anything up?
Well, it is the truth in it’s own way. I think that employers would think better of you for doing something rather than nothing at all (or so it would appear to them)
If you’ve played some bookings, list them. You might include what the gate count was, if you think that will impress someone. But don’t lie. Don’t put anything on your resume that you wouldn’t want to have heralded as a lie on the evening news. Because then you really will be unemployable!
I’d say put it on – anything is better than no work at all. But it might be a good idea to come up with an interview-friendly reason why you deliberately chose to pursue music rather than a ‘normal’ job just in case their first thought is that you only did it because you couldn’t get a job! ;)
Spoke to a careers advisor yesterday, and she seemed to agree that it would be a good idea (although she also advised re-structuring my CV generally as well). So I’m going to. Not lying, just dressing things up to make them seem better than they are.