I assure you 99% if you was unemployed or even self employed for the three years , you will get a RQ
As others have observed, there are scores of examples to the contrary. Been there, done that. (Been self-employed since my first day in Canada. Was not RQ'd.)
Context matters.
While extensive periods of unemployment may elevate the risk of increased scrutiny, this too is relative, considered in context. Depends on how this fits into general scheme of the individual's life.
Note too that
stay-at-home parents or "housewives" are NOT unemployed. Many, especially those who are parents, probably work a lot more and harder than I usually do. Whether they list it as homemaker, housekeeper,
stay-at-home-parent, or some other description, they are not "unemployed."
The latter was clarified by internal CIC memos during the big fraud purge in 2012 and 2013, when CIC adopted and was applying rather strict triage criteria and issuing RQ to a very large percentage of applicants (hit over 30% in a few months in 2012 . . . back when we could get this sort of information). During that period, any combination of unemployment and traveling abroad automatically triggered RQ, a pre-test RQ at that (have not seen any pre-test RQ reported for years now). Some local offices were issuing the RQ to students and homemakers because they were "unemployed." Internal memos instructed the local offices that homemakers (or such) and students were NOT considered unemployed for purposes of the triage criteria.
We do not know the current triage criteria that IRCC uses (even the 2012 triage criteria we know only through a widely shared leaked copy of the File Requirements Checklist, with some additional information relative to its application obtained through coordinated ATI requests). It is clearly a lot less strict now. Indeed, in 2012 just being self-employed (for any period of time) was also an automatic RQ trigger. By the time I applied in 2013 that was no longer the case. I was well prepared in the event I got RQ, but I did not (again, I was only self-employed the whole time . . . moreover, my "clients" so to say are all outside Canada).
What appears to be often missed in forums like this is the recognition that IRCC USUALLY (not always) tends to get it, to sort things out, to recognize if and when there is reason to question the applicant's reported presence in Canada. Way better than many give them credit. The epidemic level of fraud discovered in 2008 to 2010 appears to have been largely engineered by a number of crooked consultants who had figured out the system's weaknesses. Most of those have been fixed. Many of the consultants went to jail.
As others also observe, one of the fixes, so to say, is that IRCC is better able to verify the applicant's travel history more completely now. For example, one of the ways those engaged in fraud managed to cheat was to exit and enter Canada by land, via the U.S., often using a passport or travel document different from the one used in applications to CIC. CBSA and IRCC are now far better at connecting various travel documents to a client, and given that capturing entry records is more thorough now, in conjunction with being able to access entry into the U.S. records (showing an exit from Canada), these changes have made it far, far more difficult to scam the system this way.
I alluded to other tools. Cross-checking postal codes and telephone numbers for example. This stuff is well behind closed curtains, being the methods and means for investigations, but it is readily apparent that current GCMS screening goes well beyond the individual client's information.
REMINDER: The vast, vast majority of qualified applicants who follow the instructions and who provide responsive, complete, and accurate answers to all the questions in the application, and likewise properly, completely, and accurately provide travel history information using the online presence calculator, and who apply with a reasonably decent margin over the minimum, has very good odds of NO RQ-related non-routine processing, let alone a serious problem . . . UNLESS there is simply something inconsistent or sufficiently incongruous in their case effectively waiving a
big red flag. But sure, the applicant who has a family of five, living in a postal code of affluent households, reporting extended periods of unemployment, has a higher risk of being examined more closely than a mill worker who punches a time clock at a manufacturing facility in Canada twenty or more days every month.