If you've had a lot of short-term jobs in Canada, the instinct to tidy up your personal history by leaving some out is the wrong move:
- List every job, no matter how short, starting with the most recent and working backward. IRCC's personal history section is meant to be a complete record, not a curated highlight reel — gaps or omissions are a bigger red flag than an overlapping or messy-looking timeline.
- Pull exact dates from your Record of Employment (ROE). If you're unsure of start/end dates for any job, log into 'My Service Canada Account' and check your ROEs — they'll have the official dates an employer reported to Service Canada.
- Don't worry about overlaps looking odd — overlapping short gigs (e.g., part-time roles run concurrently) are common and reviewers are used to seeing them. What matters is that the history is accurate and complete, not that it looks clean.
When in doubt, more detail (backed by ROE dates) is safer than a simplified version that could look like you're hiding something.