There have been times when I have strategically done my CV in yyyy or yyyy-mm dates to make such gaps less obvious.
But if pressed you can honestly say that you have no idea what the problem was, you performed your requests, and you were given no warning. In any case that was beyond your control and didn't turn into a real job.
Why would you have to explain those? To whom? You’re an adult and what you do with your time on Earth is your decision. Run away from anyone who doesn’t respect that.
> Jobs at this time are hard to come by. The biggest employers in the industry have laid off hundreds of thousands. There is a lot of competition for every position.
> I don't tell my parents how much I make. I'm definitely not telling some random recruiter.
FWIW, there are ways to not reveal that info, but also not lie.
For example, if a recruiter / employer starts fishing for my current salary, I just say "I'm not going to talk about that, but ...", followed by some carefully worded signal about my general salary expectations.
If lying in this context doesn't bother you in the slightest, then maybe you won't see value in this approach.
It's not a lie, because this advice came from a number of HRs I interacted with for a number of years; it was suggested as their personal advice and not their professional one.
One of them even codenamed it "the cloth of protection" lol.
How does an HR person saying something isn’t a lie make it not a lie? If you’re saying something happened which didn’t happen, that’s a lie. A HR person saying it’s okay might indicate that it’s not a lie people would look askance at, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t a lie.
As others have said, the correct thing to do here is to just not even list the job on the resume in the first place. No reasonable person expects every single short stint be listed on a resume. I’ve heard three and six months suggested as guidelines for the minimum lengths of jobs one should list. Anything shorter than that probably isn’t worth going into, as you’re still onboarding at that point. Also, people get sick, have sudden illnesses in the family, or otherwise can’t work for a couple months for loads of reasons.
But if pressed you can honestly say that you have no idea what the problem was, you performed your requests, and you were given no warning. In any case that was beyond your control and didn't turn into a real job.