How do I make the best of a busy resume?

Contract and freelance work isn't a "job" in the usual sense, for a resume. Instead you have the job of "freelance technical writer", for example, perhaps with an employer of MyLastName Writing Services. Now you can spend half a page on this "job" with examples of the sorts of services you provide, and if appropriate, some customer names and types.

It should be straightforward to make separate versions of this that emphasize the writing or the development, but I would encourage you to include both. A technical writer who sometimes does the thing they're writing about is usually more valuable than one who only writes.

You're applying full-time employee resume formatting to project-based contractor work.

The solution? Treat your freelance work as two separate and continuous roles—one for each specialty—then showcasing your best projects under each. This eliminates gaps, keeps you under two pages, and lets you customize for each application. Each resume follows the same format. One-page resumes are for less than 5 years of experience. A two page resume is expected.

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

who you are, what you do, years of experience, key strength

CORE COMPETENCIES / SKILLS

Column 1: Lead role competencies | Column 2: secondary role competencies

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

[Your Consulting Company Name] | Consultant or Self-Employed | 2015 – Present

Lead Title

[Project 1/Client 1/(fka "job")] (Year or Range)

Description, quantified results (Did x, with y, yielded z)

Secondary Title

[Project 2/Client 2/(fka "job")] (Year or Range)

Description, quantified results (Did x, with y, yielded z)

EDUCATION

"Should I label the section 'Relevant Experience'?" No, use "Professional Experience."

"Should I have an entry for gaps saying 'working in a different career'?" No, with the structure above, there are no gaps.

"Do I stop at 2 pages regardless of years?" Yes, include your most impressive projects relevant to each role.

"Anything else I can do?" Yes. Let this format showcase your dual expertise while you keep focus on what's relevant. Use your cover letter to speak directly to why you're right for this specific role.

I’d recommend keeping your CV fairly standard and include your full working history and experience.

What you can do to really improve your chances is create a really targeted and informative cover letter that describes concisely and clearly why you’re a good fit for the role you’re applying for.

I’ve spoken with a few hiring managers recently and they’ve said that a good cover letter really does help in creating a shortlist.

I summarized the freelance years as a single line in the employment history, and listed the various projects in a separate "Projects" section. That seems to work well for me.

If freelance work is the last item in the list, your cover letter needs to explain why you want to switch.

There are a few possible approaches, with various pros and cons, which could work better or worse depending on the specifics of your resume:

• Limit jobs to 1-2 lines in your resume (company, job title and time period in 1 line, optional brief description and/or accomplishments in another line) if they're:

  • Not particularly recent
  • Not particularly relevant
  • There are few to no stand-out achievements and/or
  • You need the space for more recent or more relevant things.

  In general, jobs from like 10 years ago should have fairly short entries (even if relevant), since hiring managers tend to care more about what you've been doing more recently. You could of course make an exception for something exceptionally relevant or impressive.

• List older jobs under a single entry of "Earlier consulting roles", from where you can pick out a few key highlights.

  I'd say this approach may be superior to listing all your consulting jobs under a single entry or two because it creates a better impression of how you spent your time recently (the more distant past is less important). But if you have a lot of recent jobs you want to exclude, the jobs are rather short (less than a year on average) and/or these are part-time jobs that overlap, this may not be the best approach.

  There are various details you could add here in various ways, depending on how much space you want this to take up and what you want the focus to be on:

  • You could say something like "Consultant for [list of all or most companies]" in a single sentence.
  • You could have a single bullet point list of achievements across any of these companies.
  • You could dedicate a few lines to each of a select few jobs in that period.

• List freelancing in a less relevant topic as a single entry.

  Let's say you're applying to a job in Excel/VBA development. For consulting in that field, you could list each job separately. But for technical writing consulting, you could put that under a single job as "Technical writing consultant", which spans the entire consulting period.

  This might still create the impression of having gaps at first glance, since jobs wouldn't be neatly chronological, and the initial impression is very important.

• Simply omit older (particularly short-term) jobs.

  Hiring managers are unlikely to care if you have a 6-month gap 10 years ago, especially if you have a lot short-term contracting jobs. If it's 5 years ago or a 1 year gap, they're more likely to care. Use your best judgement to decide where that line is.

One interesting alternative which I did not see proposed here is to write in the CV all the jobs that you had, in any form that you like.

When getting ready to send the CV to a potential employer, make sure to write the relevant jobs with the standard font of the CV, and the less relevant jobs with a smaller font, possibly italic and not bold.

In this way, the potential employer can easily focus on what is relevant, and he can also read what happened in between.

Just be sure to tell in the CV which work was employment, and which work was freelance. The more information is readily readable, the fewer questions you need to answer.

I consider the CV to be for the most part a waste of time. It is part of the ceremonial dance that is the job interview. So it has that, but so many times over the years I have been asked for my LinkedIn profile when it is the literal first thing on my CV.

If the recruiter is not reading the literal first thing on my CV I do get the distinct impression that he or she is not reading any of it. I think the CV only really becomes a factor when you are halfway to getting the position and the real discussions start over whether an employer wants you.

So my advice would be to just dump all the info and not worry too much about the finer details about it. Make sure it is succinct and the language use is correct, but whether any information is redundant or not does not really matter because your CV will only ever get read when you basically already have been placed and the recruiter / HR manager wants specifics.

You may be surprised how little of your CV / Resume would ever actually get read. It is not worth getting all OCD over.