It is one thing to frame your experiences in ways that are relevant to what the job is looking for: it is not only unethical to fabricate experiences, it is counter-productive. I will be checking references, and if their reports of the role you played on a project don't match yours I will not be hiring you. If you don't have references who can speak to the work you did, I also won't be hiring you. All you have done is waste my time and yours.

The sheer number of applications from auto-submit-to-every-job application processes have completely broken the system. There is simply no way for every recruiter to consider ever candidate, which is what they are now being asked to do. I know that is frustrating, and I am sorry you are in that place, but lying will not help.

We will eventually figure out how to defeat these candidate-spam bots. In the meantime the only hiring pipelines that are still functional are human-to-human individual networking.

For example, in 2003, I was fresh out of college and the job market was slow. I applied at a retail store so I could have some beer money. I was honest that I was looking for a job in tech and that I wasn't going to stay forever. Then I said I'd probably be there for 3-4 months.

I was there for 2 weeks, and I don't list the job on my resume.

Was I telling the truth when I said 3-4 months? I certainly gave them the longer end of the estimate in my head.

Was I telling the truth when I left the retail job off of my resume?