I’d leave it on because you have a good employment record and everyone is entitled to one mistake. I would not put any of the explanations on your resume at all (they don’t belong there) and maybe put something about discovering it is not a good match in the cover letter - very short.
Now, if I were interviewing someone and they told me that they got put on a pseudo-PIP in six days, I’d laugh my ass off about what a moron the boss was. We are lucky of we get people logins in six days. And, if you interview well, the reason for your PIP would be another laugher. Any reasonable prospective boss would say “yup, I understand why you’re looking for a job.”
BTW, since you are not quitting yet, the two month stint can easily be 3 before anything happens.
Just want to say that I appreciate all the responses. Thank you. A few of you said I might be overthinking this, and you’re right. I am panicking because I have no safety net here; I burned through a lot of my savings moving a really long way to an area with a higher cost of living. I took the risk in moving because otherwise, I’d always regret for the rest of my life not taking the opportunity.
But unfortunately, moving such a long distance exacerbates all my issues. I don’t have any close friends or family here - there’s no couch to crash on while I look for a job. I’m completely alone. The stakes just feel really high and I’m stressing out because I don’t have a huge margin for error. I don’t have the money to absorb months of a job search. So I’m trying to figure out the best way to position myself at the outset - I don’t necessarily have time to start out on the wrong foot, if that makes sense.
I don’t put every job on my resume OR application and I doubt anyone over 40 does. And I doubt that the HR attorneys want you to.
I’m getting to that age where chronologically the bottom of my resume has dropped off. Does anyone care that I worked at Fanny Farmer in college? Or that in middle school I had a few paid acting jobs? But they do care if I have a work history back to 1978, because if you do the math and make the assumption that its a post college resume, that puts me in the whole “protected class” area (I’m not there yet, but since I was “working” at eleven, my full and complete work history might make you think that). Which is the double edge sword of difficult to get hired and able to sue. In my experience, HR would rather have their hiring managers work as blind as possible about that stuff.
Look, in most states in most jobs they can lay me off because I made the mistake of wearing purple sparkly nail polish to work. If they want to fire you, they’ll fire you regardless of a complete application. If they want to keep you, you can lie like a rug on your application, fail your drug test, wear sparkly nail polish and stay employed (I’ve seen it happen - ok, it wasn’t nail polish, it was some astoundlingly sexist and inappropriate tattoos).
Anyway, all the best. I managed eighteen months at my “bad cultural fit” and I’m six months into “I wonder if this paycheck will bounce.” And threading the needle with resumes and appropriate interview answers is tough. I will say that while MSmith has a very good point about answers, I’ve run into far too many hiring managers who are working off a script and you give them script answers that they can check off as good, you are fine. And if you go off script, then they don’t know what to do. The script answer is “it wasn’t a good fit” if you leave it on. Me, I’d leave it off.
Makes me glad I have no plans to ever work for the government. I wonder what they’d do with me, because I can’t remember the company, never mind the supervisor, address, or phone number, of every job I’ve had. That two-day envelope-stuffing job I did at 17? No idea what the place was called. Or the other envelope-stuffing job I worked immediately post-college. I’ve worked with so many temp and recruiting agencies over the years I couldn’t tell you which agency got me which job, especially if it was more than five years ago. Heck, I’m probably forgetting one or more restaurants I waited tables at back when, too. Do people seriously keep job records that long?