Interesting. I didn't know that this type of engagement existed. D10 what's in it for you? Why would you not have just gone straight to the customer?

The example I gave was the most egregious with the ridiculously small font. I think we ended up talking to that guy anyway but it didn't go anywhere.

I saw another good one recently. This combines the name recognition thing with another layer of deception.

The guy had 3 pieces of work history. The earliest is Google in giant font and in a normal font what the role was. It was something non technical having to do with survey administration or something. Followed by a 2 year gap (finishing school). Then it's 3 months in a contractor gig. Then a 3 month gap. Then 8 months as technical co-founder of a startup that doesn't have a current website or any Google hits.

We actually phone screened that guy and he bombed. Hard. A colleague was conducting his first phone screen so I was listening in to give him feedback. I'm hearing how poorly this guy is doing so I look up his resume and I'm just floored. Our recruiter got a refresher on exactly what we're looking for after that one.

Edit to add that the deception is he knew nothing about the tech steak he claimed to be using those 8 months.

(FWIW it's not a programming job but if/when I look for another job that's what I'll be targeting.) I didn't have the option to go straight to the customer, the contract they offered required a team of people. They didn't want to negotiate and manage multiple contracts or do the administrative work of finding applicants and handling the HR responsibilities for everyone. So a separate company took the contract and hired myself and others to do the work. Not really anything in it for me other than it was the structure I had to accept if I wanted the job.

"Contractor @ <pedigree>" seems fine.

The example listed before is prob insta-trash regardless of qualifications. If you really irritate someone in the future, this can almost certainly be considered resume fraud and used to terminate you.

Not looking to bowl over, but this is the experience I had:

I met the department head of Apple Maps at SXSW and chatted about joining the data quality team. He told me that it was a 6 month contract. I said that's fine and he gave me his email address. I sent my resume and a few days later I was contacted by the contracting company, who explained how the whole process works.

The reason, in this case, is that it would be impossible to join Apple directly for this position. If I did get the job, I probably wouldn't bother mentioned the contracting company on my resume.

For certain positions, companies don't want to give full benefits. All the big companies do this in some form. The ACA locked this down harder since the administrative overhead is too much to handle. It's easier, cheaper, and less of a legal risk to outsource the headaches.

This is basically giving their HR department cause to fire you whenever they feel like it. Kinda like tweeting explicit sexual comments to your company's social media.

It doesn't even matter whether its legit or not. It pretty much matters whether in house legal thinks they have a reasonable case, since no one is going to court over this. Claiming employment by a company that has never sent you a paycheck is pretty lol.

I have a buddy that worked at apple in resource planning. Everyone in his group starts as a contractor. If they like you in 6-12 months they'll offer a full time job.

They do this for a few reasons, the main one being it's easier to get rid of you. Things like unemployment, state reduction in force regulations, healthcare/cobra make this a huge pain in the ass for employers.

The secondary is they don't have to provide all the company benefits to you and just keep you as a second class citizen.

Contract employees is an absolutely huge part of any BigCo.

Doing things like this:

Is deceitful.

When explaining to friends/family/2+2 it is fine to say that you work at BigCo, because according to the information they are seeking, that answer completely accomplishes the desired outcome.

But when it comes to applying to companies, you are always better off saying:

Contract Engineer at Google through Teksystems

vs

Engineer at Google

I don't think any lawyer would let you do this over inventing and documenting a fireable cause which is not hard at all. Also being paid through a third-party is not what's important here - the important distinction is between permanent position vs contract position. If Apple directly paid you but through 1099, that wouldn't change the situation at all.

What he suggested is criminal in a decent number of states. Pretty sure defrauding your employer is a pretty decent reason to be released. But I'm sure you have broad expertise in many states over this issue. Thanks for your input.

I'd probably put something like "Apple / Contractor" or something similar, as I have with the contract I had previously, which looks like "[company] / Independent Contractor." It at lease explains why I no longer work there. Yes, I got a paycheck from the company directly.

Not sure what the whole angle is about firing for making a mistake on your resume. If you've ever interviewed, you'd know how many people outright lie on their resumes, which is low-class though I know they are doing it to get ahead in life. Doesn't mean I would implicitly support them by bringing them on board. Let someone else get suckered.

As far as I know, most jobs don't need good reasons to fire you and most are effectively at-will regardless what the paperwork says. It is disconcerting to me that they'd just randomly find a reason to fire you after you've proven you are a good worker.

I've been handed all sorts of silly and stupid reasons with pink slips, every one of them outright lies. The best was the claim I was selling drugs at work, which I'm sure could have been a slander suit considering I was Straight Edge at that time and I never did drugs in my life, even to this day, but whatever, life is too short for that kind of bull****. If a company wants to get rid of me, they'll figure out a way, and why would I care if they don't want me?

Citation please. Someone working at Apple with Apple employees being paid by Apple claiming to work for Apple and merely neglecting to mention a third-party intermediary almost certainly does not rise to the level of criminal fraud.

I'm not sure how they would find out. I'm talking about a situation where you could call anyone from the pedigree company and ask "Hey was d10 a contractor at your company?" and they would say yes. Even though they've never directly paid me and I get W2's and benefits from a completely separate company.

This is possible if you successfully misled them into an offer and it's the actual reason why they want to fire you. What Mihkel is suggesting - HR noticing an error ahead of time, holding onto the information and using it to fire you when you later did something that they wanted to remove you for - simply does not make much sense. Simply having this kind of process where you retain dirt on employees is a massive legal liability and if there's any paper trail that shows that they have been aware of something and did not act on it, that's a huge legal problem. You can fire anyone for any reason except a few that are not legally allowed. The whole reason why HR wants an excuse is to show you're not being fired for those reasons that are not allowed - not having acted on something when you were already aware pretty much kills this entire defense.

The reason why HR would want cover for firing when they are firing for normal, allowed reasons is because lots of reasons to fire people are not uniformly applied and there sometimes exists paper trail that appears to contradict the stated reason. For example, you may want to fire someone for performance reasons but his review may have been better than some other poeple who are not getting fired. Or his manager may have praised him in an email recently or compared him favorably to others. In that case, you may want to invent a reason that specifically applies to the person in question and no one else that's not being fired. Likea a zero-tolerance rule violation that is normally taken seriously but stretched to fit the case.

Resume discrepancy of this kind (leaving out an intermediary), unless it's much more egregious, is highly unlikely to stand up to this kind of scrutiny. It's quite possible if not likely that this came up during interviews or discussions over email and you clarified what you meant, leaving a paper trail. Unless they have a zero-tolerance policy, it's extremely likely that this also applies to many other current employees - minor discrepancies may have come up during background check and the company was fine after getting clarification.

cb,

Lets not put words in my mouth. Your summary is a clear fabrication.

Your understanding of the circumstances is incorrect. That is probably the source of your combativeness. Please reread and then see if you are still confused.

If you're 1099'ed through an intermediary, you're still being paid by Apple. We're not talking about a situation where dave was a full-time employee at some company and what he gets paid has nothing to do with whether Apple needs him or not - we were talking about a situation where he was literally hired by Apple to do what Apple needs and paid by Apple for what he did, merely with an intermediary taking a cut for their services. Just like how an Uber driver is paid by the passenger even if Uber handles billing and takes a cut. The common law system uses the reasonable person standard and does not look kindly upon the kind of nitpicking you're engaging in here.

This is not far from saying that because your employer uses a third-party HR/PEO service and technically, your employer and they co-employ you, you need to also mention them as your employer on your resume. So do I now work for Justworks (not the actual PEO we're using, just mentioning an example)?

Typically HR doesn't run a background search directly off the resume - they run it off of a formal application that they have you fill out where you specify these things and they compare against the resume to make sure that they are congruent (this does not have to be exact as long as you're being reasonable and one does not dramatically sound better than the other). You probably want to lean towards writing exactly what's verifiable through contacting HR departments. If you mislead them into thinking that it was a permanent, full-time job, then it's possible that the query goes through the part of HR where they have no record of you existing.

To clarify, I didn't work at Apple.

Pretty sure it would have also been under a W2. The contracting company covers benefits, taxes, etc.

Unlike a legal contract, you show up to work on time, use Apple's computers, etc. Basically you'd be treated as an employee. If people really want to talk about legal, calling this an independent contractor position is wrong. Overall, it seems more analogous to a temp position, but since we aren't serving coffee, different words.

FYI daveT,

I'm speaking from experience in billing 7 figures through W2 contractors who show up to the client site, report to the client, and use the client's hardware/computers.

Okay... I'm just pointing out the legalize contradictions.

It seems some interviewers do not know the difference either way. In any case, if Apple is making the ultimate calls on everything, I don't see how you can't say you didn't work for Apple. If it was a position where Apple had no say so in initial hiring and the agency sent semi random Joe's like any odd temp service, then it is obvious I'd be working for the intermediary and not Apple. This doesn't seem so clear cut to me.

There's a big difference between a contract position and a permanent position in terms of hiring criteria at these kinds of places where it's considered very difficult to get in. When people see Google/Apple whatever on their resume, people are primarily impressed that they let you in - that somehow you were able to pass these presumably difficult interviews. For contract positions, even if they do the screening, it's generally abbreviated, task-specific and not indicative of their general ability beyond the task at hand. The types of work that are given to contractors are also usually not core to what they are doing either - again, at these types of places, contractors are far more likely to be brought into fill in the gaps and do things that they don't think is important enough to put their full-time engineers on (of course there are exceptions, especially when it comes to domain or technical expertise that is difficult to hire in the standard manner). Now if you're talking about some government agencies or something, contractors may very well be the more talented ones brought into do interesting work that the employees can't do, but that's usually not the case at Apples and Googles of the world.

Again, I don't care about the legal or HR or whatever but to me it's about communication. Are you trying to get your audience to understand who you genuinely are or are you trying to mislead them into thinking that you're something that you're not?

If Apple converts someone to full time, does that mean the resume has to specify contract then full time since said person never passed the difficult hiring process? I know this comes across sarcastic, but genuine question.

What you are describing is called contract-to-hire and it is very respectable, basically on-par with the normal hiring process, with some bias towards specific domain experience or a specific project's success.

I think in general it is a great way for companies and people to figure out if it is a good mutual fit as well, but unfortunately it isn't that common, also because of laws.

This. Dave, I'm not really sure why you keep talking about edge cases like they are representative here. You could be a super-duper-100x-ninja-rockstar programmer that's much better than an average Apple engineer and be a contractor at Apple. That doesn't mean an attempt at blurring the difference between a contract position and a permanent position would not be seen as dishonest. People who go to Harvard Extension School literally go to Harvard and take classes that are taught by Harvard professors. But if you make it sound like you went to the actual Harvard that people care about, no one is going to buy that you weren't trying to inflate your credentials.