How to Handle Virtual, Contract and Self Employment on a Resume

Many years ago, I owned a business and, after selling it, looked for a regular, full time job. I found out very quickly, self-employment was not always an asset; sometimes it was considered a threat to those who never started something new. I never got the job. About five years ago, on  a lark, I interviewed for full-time job that required a technical writing portfolio. While I was not looking for a job per se, I decided to go on the interview. When I interviewed with the boss, I was told that they had hired contract writers before (for this full time position) and it wasn't a good experience because they had a tendency to leave after 6 months because they wanted to "be free." I didn't get the job on that one, either.

I won't say all self-employed or contract workers experience difficulties in obtaining full-time employment, but as non-traditional work is growing, and people form S-corporations to run out of their homes, it becomes more important in how you handle this employment on your resume to prevent being screened out early in the hiring process or pose a threat to an insecure boss.

Early Career
How you handle this employment depends on your career level. If you are a new graduate and have taken a 3-month contract job to get some experience, you should consider the contract job as regular employment. Use the  same format you would for a regular full-time job. Sometimes job seekers will place "via ABC Staffing Agency" beside the name of the company you worked for. This technique clarifies the employment relationship. But, I have found this technique is unnecessary. Potential employers are more concerned about what you did and what you can do for them than what temp agency you worked for. In any event, the actual "employer" in your contract gig will come out in the first job interview. Just so everything can be documented, you will be fine.

Virtual employment is the newest kind of contract work. This type of work is done online via a bidding network such as elance.com, odesk.com, or vworker.com. Since the virtual worker doesn't work for these websites, and sometimes their actual "employer" is an individual or a business outside of the U.S., it becomes a more of a challenge in how this contract employment is treated on a resume. How you treat it would depend on who you work for and how long. If you had worked virtually for a business and provided remote tech support services, I would not mention the websites I cited above; rather, I would use the name of the client and explain on the resume that it is a "remote position." If you work for the company on a regular basis, you will have a supervisor or a project manager, so it is essentially like full-time employment.

However, if your virtual contract work consists of many employers over very short term periods (i.e., 1 day to 1 week), then I would use the website as the "employer" and describe five projects you worked on as bullet points. The challenge here is identifying your supervisor at the website because there is none. The website is simply a job task marketplace and a payment processor. You will then have to select one or more of the employers you worked for as your boss. Nonetheless, this is an imperfect solution, and that's why it is very important that you provide very rich detail about your virtual or non-traditional employment because the detail gives it a higher degree of credibility.

Mid Career
The way you handle contract or virtual employment on a resume changes when you have 5 to 10 years of experience. With this amount of experience, if you simply list your contract jobs as if they are regular, full-time jobs, you may inadvertently be labeled as "a job jumper," which has always had a negative connotation in the hiring process. Some hiring managers think job jumpers have problems holding a job or getting along with people and that makes them unreliable and someone to avoid hiring. But, even this is changing as the job creation of contract work is increasing at a more rapid pace than regular, full-time jobs. So, mid-career people should shorten the time span of their resume while deepening the information for each contract job. For example, instead of listing 10 contract jobs over the past 10 years, just list the last 6 you've had over the past 6 years. With the 6 contract jobs listed on your resume, double the information you use to discuss each job. List the skills you used on the job, the duties, the responsibilities, training completed, and the achievements.

Late Career
Consulting and contract jobs used to be the norm for late career professionals, not early- or mid-career people. After all, by the time you get 15 or more years of experience you have contacts, inside connections and a deep knowledge of products and services such that you run a job search in the hidden job market and your asking price would be above and beyond most pay scales. The problem created with contract work at this time is that with a long career, you have a greater chance of having employment gaps, career changes and other employment inconsistencies. So, a contract work entry on the resume becomes a common way to cover up these "red flags."

The solution is to provide incontrovertible evidence of what you do and who you did it for. This is a modification of the approach I described for the mid-career person. Let me illustrate this with an example:

I was working with a 50-year old job seeker who had a career of helping new ventures market their products. As is the nature of start up companies, the employment is short-term and contract-oriented. As we went over his resume, he first called himself a Business Development Consultant and did not identify an employer. The first red flag. Then he described his duties as: Preparation of business development plans with a view to securing venture capital for start-up businesses. Sounds somewhat vague, doesn't it? The second red flag. His goal was to find a steady, regular job as a Director of Marketing.

At face value, I thought, "good luck." But, there is a way to deal it. It's all about the detail. Even though he had a non-traditional employment, he could leverage it to his advantage by increasing the amount of detail and quantifying the achievements. So, he changed things around on his resume in the following way:

B2B-Contract and Consulting Business Service Provider
SUMMARY: Provided Business Development and Marketing Communication support for Start-up, Venture Capital and Emerging Industry Sectors.

• Consulted with the following companies: incom, inc., 4tobe.com, vanguardone.com, New Materials LLC, Nanotechnology Manufacturing, Inc.
• Interpreted market intelligence data enabling the overview and development of B2B business models, platforms, strategies, and market placement for $50-500K start-up projects
• Managed a $300K marketing budget resulting in $4 million in product sales
• Implemented business process development with a new operating procedures and IT platform resulting in an enrollment increase of 38% and a revenue increase of 22%

When a recruiter reads this entry, she does not see red flags because the detail is rich, objective and quantified. She has the name of the companies and can go research them or contact them for references.