So, you may have noticed the economy is not doing so great! Who could have seen this coming? (Besides everyone who spent a year warning us this would happen, that is.)

But if the last big recession is any indication, there is a hidden opportunity to boost your resume in a way that just might help you weather it. It’s all about seizing the opportunities of economic collapse!

A man shared how his friends used the last recession to make their resumes stand out.

Influencer Alex Pearlman is known for his irreverent — and often cathartically furious — takes on today’s political mess. Our recent economic turmoil has sent one of his past videos about the last big recession we suffered into circulation again.

In it, he described how the Great Recession of 2008 actually worked in several of his friends’ favor because they were able to boost their resumes by claiming to have held impressive positions at companies that went under.

Today, there are a few companies in particular that some feel might just prove to be golden opportunities for subterfuge pretty soon, especially as major economic turmoil seems to be on the horizon.

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He said his friends got better positions by filling their resume gaps with fake jobs at Circuit City during the Great Recession.

“This is not my first recession,” Pearlman said in his video, “so I’m gonna explain the Circuit City grift to you.” For the young people reading this, that very name might mean nothing to you, but back in the day, Best Buy actually had a competitor, and its name was Circuit City.

They were essentially the same store and just competed on price (which is how a functional capitalist economy is supposed to work, by the way, instead of monopolies as we have now, but whatever!) Right around the time the Great Recession hit in 2008, they collapsed and went out of business seemingly overnight.

The Great Recession, of course, meant tons of layoffs. Many of us were staring down the dreaded employment gap on our resumes, just like so many workers are nowadays with all the layoffs that have happened in the past couple of years.

So his friends seized the opportunity of Circuit City’s collapse, filling their resume gaps with retail management positions or corporate jobs at the now-defunct company. “Nobody could prove otherwise,” Pearlman said. “There was no HR department to call, there was nothing you could verify this information against.”

Theoretically, they may be able to find a former HR person on LinkedIn, for example, but that’s a lot of effort to put in, only to more than likely wind up at a dead end. And recruiters barely pay attention to our resumes anyway — studies have shown they spend an average of just SIX SECONDS skimming the dates, companies, and job titles before making a decision on whether to interview you. So who’s going to bother verifying your tall tale?

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What sparked Pearlman to make his video, he said, was an experience he witnessed with a Twitter employee following Elon Musk’s 2022 purchase of the company.

Much like Musk has done recently with the federal government via his DOGE initiative, he fired huge swathes of Twitter employees — to the point that one worker ended up tweeting Musk to ask him if he still had a job after he was unable to reach anyone in HR due to so many firings.

“So y’all, you know what that means,” Pearlman said in his video. “It means it’s time for all of us to now be former employees of Twitter. Don’t like your job? You haven’t been doing that job — you worked for Twitter for 4 years. You were the director of ad sales. I don’t give a (expletive).”

Now the Twitter, or X, whatever, of 2025 is a different story — the company has, like, actual leadership now. But given the ongoing collapse of Tesla’s stockwhich Musk used as collateral for his purchase of Twitter… Well, let’s just say we all might be able to put X on our resumes sooner than we think (and maybe Tesla too, for that matter).

Still, there are plenty of other companies that have gone under recently that present the same opportunity. In a recent repost of Pearlman’s videocommenters jokingly shared their new resume additions. “This just made me realize I was an assistant manager at Big Lots up until this year,” one person wrote. “We are all JoAnn’s managers now,” another added. Both retailers have recently announced they will be closing all stores. Party City is likely to follow.

So there you have it. Do a bit of the ol’ Circuit City subterfuge and fill those resume gaps with fake Joann and Party City jobs! The whole job market is basically a scam now anyway. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Or as Pearlman put it, “grift yourself.” (Just don’t say you heard about it from us.)

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.