How To List Freelance Work On Resume

Choose Which Projects To Include

Great resumes usually include a work experience section. For independent contractors, this section may be a list of projects rather than a detailed employment history. You can choose which of your past projects you want to include in your experience section. It can also be useful to focus on the experiences that relate to the positions that you’re interested in to show recruiters that you are qualified for the role you want.

One way to do this is by listing the client you worked with, the dates you worked and a bulleted list of your responsibilities and accomplishments for each relevant project you completed. This works especially well if you worked for one client or company for a long period of time.

Everything You Need To Know About Listing Freelance Work On A Resume

If youve done freelance work, adding it to your resume can be an important way to demonstrate your skill set. Learn how to include it in this article.

8 months ago 7 min read

Freelance work is becoming increasingly common in todays marketplace. If youve done freelance work yourself, you should consider adding it to your resume, particularly if it encompasses the same skill set youd be using at the position youre applying for.

This article covers when you should include your freelance experience on your resume, and provides examples of how you can do so.

How Strong Is A Verbal Agreement In Court

Most business professionals are wary of entering into contracts orally because they can difficult to enforce in the face of the law.

If an oral contract is brought in front of a court of law, there is increased risk of one party lying about the initial terms of the agreement. This is problematic for the court, as there’s no unbiased way to conclude the case often, this will result in the case being disregarded. Moreover, it can be difficult to outline contract defects if it’s not in writing.

That being said, there are plenty of situations where enforceable contracts do not need to be written or spoken, they’re simply implied. For instance, when you buy milk from a store, you give something in exchange for something else and enter into an implied contract, in this case – money is exchanged for goods.

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Keep It In Black And White

Aside from the content on your resume, the second most important thing is that your resume is legible and easy to read. Avoid light colors completely. In fact, itâs encouraged to keep your resume in black and white only. You can include one accent color if you like but keep the majority of your text in black or at least 80â90% gray or black.

Cv & Resume Templates

A thoughtfully designed CV or resume can help you stand out from other candidates, and make a memorable first impression. It isn’t enough to use the standard template in MS Wordyou need to be thinking more creatively! In this series, we’re sharing tips, advice and templates for creating the perfect CV or resume!

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Composing A Resume With The Freelance Work Examples Also Requires Knowing Some Basic Aspects

• Create an understandable introduction.

If previously youve worked as a freelancer and now you are looking for a full-time job it is not necessary to indicate that you are a freelancer in the job title. Just write the job position that reflects your duties. But in the introduction section, it is better to explain to the recruiters about your freelance work experience and describe the work you performed.

• Provide your best work examples

If you wonder how to list freelance work on a resume, choose the most significant long-term projects and indicate them as normal jobs.

• Indicate big organizations names

Preferably highlight large companies for which you have worked. Most recruiters will be impressed by big names right away. Important business indicates that you know how to do your job well.

• Avoid irrelevant information

The biggest mistake freelancers often do is including irrelevant job experience in their resumes. During freelancing people often work with a wide range of big and small projects. Describing your large experience it is easy to get carried away and include the examples that are not relevant to the chosen job position. Recruiters are busy and therefore, they dont want to read a huge list of small projects, so choose only the most important and appropriate ones.

• Dont forget about skills that youve developed as a freelancer

Give Yourself A Company Name

One thing that you should decide on before you try to highlight freelance work in your resume is a company name. Think of it this way: if you were self-employed in the traditional way, you would have a business name to list.

Well, you should create a company name to use for your freelance work as well. And no, you donât need to go through the process of setting up a formal company to do that. Simply craft a company name and use it in descriptions of your freelance work.

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Group Smaller Projects Together

Listing every single client youve worked with can take up a lot of space. If youve worked on a lot of smaller freelance projects for numerous different clients, consider grouping them together rather than listing all of them individually.

Heres an example of how you can group several smaller projects together in one bullet point on your resume:

Designed marketing materials including posters, brochures and newsletters for 15+ clients

However, you should always name-drop any notable clients youve worked for. Big name clients can help catch recruiters attention and add to your credibility.

Heres an example of how to include mentions of notable clients:

Wrote 200+ articles for clients in the technology and finance space, including for WIRED and Financial Times

Skip These Unnecessary Space Wasters

In fact, there are some traditional resume components that you can almost always skip completely, including:

• Objective. Usually taking up a line or two of space at the top of your resume or CV, this is redundant after your targeted cover letter and costs precious seconds that potential clients could be using to take in your skills and experience.
• References available upon request. You should definitely have professional references, ready to gobut you don’t need to tell people that. They’ll assume that you’ll be willing to furnish them with contact information for happy clients and previous employers.

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Use Your Cover Letter To Showcase Your Skills Juggling Both Jobs

When you write a cover letter to go along with your resume, use it to describe how you balanced working a full-time job and a side hustle and succeeded in both.

For example, you can showcase how your ability to meet deadlines for freelance projects in your spare time highlights your effective time management skills.

You can also note how managing the responsibilities of two roles means you can handle a greater workload than other applicants.

Use this opportunity to reassure the hiring manager that if youre planning to continue with your freelance work, it wont affect your ability to handle a full-time job.

Remember All The Extras

Freelancing requires a variety of skills that aren’t directly related to their work. Freelancers need to manage their own time effectively, market their services to potential clients, communicate clearly about their work, manage their billing and expenses and keep their own financial records. Including these skills on your resume shows recruiters that you have a range of hard and soft skills that you can bring to the role.

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Learn How To Build A Successful Freelance Design Business

Now that you know exactly how to add freelance design to your resume, best practices, how to format your design, and tips for making a great first impression, whatâs next in building a successful freelance design business and landing more clients?

Check out part 1 of our Intro to Freelancing series on the Flux YouTube channel:

If youâre ready to dive deeper into freelancing, want to set yourself up for success, and move at a faster pace learning from others whoâve done it, check out our course The 6 Figure Freelance Designer.

In this course, we share the step-by-step business-building roadmap. Youâll learn how to set up a proven marketing system to consistently bring in clients, refine your niche and how you describe the value of your services, improve your sales and negotiation skills to close higher-paying projects, and run your business smoothly and set yourself up for steady growth. Through weekly mentorship calls and done for you business templates and resources, youâll have everything you need to build a profitable freelance design business.

How To Relate This Experience To My Professional Field Oris This Experience Handy For The Company Im Applying To

In other words, your freelance experience should be relevant only this way it can help you.If you decided to list your freelance work on a resume, checking out the following tips is crucial. It is ok not to have any idea about how to produce a quality and outstanding resume today.

Just be sure to draw your attention to reliable companies such as the online resume service Resume Writing Lab, which are the real professionals in the resume writing field. Then, move to the most exciting part of our article how to put freelance work on a resume.

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Roman is the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest, a Content Marketing Specialist and an expert in SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Link Building. He enjoys sharing the experiences gained along the way working as a marketer and helping other entrepreneurs succeed. His work has been published on different blogs and mediums like Crazy Egg, Forbes, Upwork, ShareThis, etc.

How To Put You Are A Freelancer On Your Freelancer Resume

A freelance resume doesnt have to be very different from regular professional resumes.For example, if you are looking for a consulting job, were you a freelance consultant?If youre looking for a writing job, were you a freelance writer?You can view both as a complete job.

In simpler words, showcase your freelance work just as you would showcase your fieldwork.

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How To List Freelance Work On A Resume: Guide With Examples

Oh, so you are a freelancer? just a couple of years ago freelance work on a resume might have surprised some employers. Today, thats rarely the case.

More and more people are choosing to freelance full-time, rather than just moonlight on the side. According to Deloitte, some 57 million US workers are part of the freelance economy. Thats equivalent to 36% of the total workforce. By 2027, the proportion of freelancers and gig workers can increase to 50%. Why so?

Digital technologies and connectivity has democratized access to remote work. As long as you have a laptop and stable Internet, you can virtually check-in to work from any location, at any time of the day and in any capacity.

Likewise, online freelance marketplaces, professional social media networks like LinkedIn, and remote job websites made it easy to secure new gigs. Because almost anyone from anywhere can now find extra work online, the traditional career paths have become more diverse and thats a great thing!

But how do you fit your ample and varied freelance work into a standard one-page resume? This guide provides the must-know tips with several freelance resume samples!

Tips For Creating A Freelancing Resume

While writing your freelancing resume, follow these tips:

• Use action words such as “plan,””won” and “improved” to describe your achievements.

• Tailor your resume to the specific job where you are applying.

• Research the standard for resumes in your industry for any sector-specific advice.

• Focus on your best, most relevant strengths.

• List excerpts of positive reviews from previous contracts.

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Pick The Most Relevant Freelance Work And Accomplishments

Keep in mind that you shouldnt aim to include every project or client youve worked with . Your goal should be to pick the most relevant freelance work youve done, with the best projects or accomplishments included, while ideally keeping your resume at one page long.

If youre applying for a full time graphic designer position, for example, you should include your graphic design work – but leave off your wedding photography side job.

How Do You List Freelance Work On Your Resume

Congratulations, your freelance business is proving successful. But how do you handle talking about it or explaining freelance work to potential employers, or on your resume? It can be a hard subject to explain as a single entry on paper, and you dont want freelance work to look like an employment gap.

There are some things you can do to on paper to help present freelance work in a way that is more understandable to others. The key for many freelancers especially those working part-time is remembering to include freelance work as part of your resume and design portfolio. Sometimes those jobs can be just the thing you need to help land the next big gig!

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When You Get A Full

When you land your new job and put your business on the shelf, make sure you retain good relationships, records and files so you can revive it all later if needed. Or you can keep it going as a side hustle, an ongoing source of extra cash and income security, tax deductions, networking, career development and an opportunity to flex expertise-muscles you may not use on your regular job.

Now you know how to list freelance work on your resume in a way that really works!

Develop Your Elevator Speech

Now you know what you’re good at, and what you want to do. Distill that into a description that takes a minute or less to deliverin other words, about the length of time it would take to explain your goals to a stranger in an elevator.

Another way to think about this is as your LinkedIn-headline speech or your Twitter-bio speechin short, it’s the essence of who you are and what you want in a freelance career. Whatever you want to call it, this will be the organizing idea behind your resume. Depending on the format you choose, it might even go at the top of your resume or CV.

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Keep Legibility At Top Of Mind

Make sure the font is set at a good size. A typical Word document defaults to 12 pt font size. This is way too large for your resume, especially if you need to include a lot of information. But you also donât want to scale down your text to try to fit everything onto one page and as a result, itâs too small for anyone to read. A good recommendation is to keep your body text sizes between 8â10pt. But feel free to add larger headers throughout as a way to divide each of your sections and create hierarchy.

Hierarchy is key in designing this 1-page document. For more tips on how to create hierarchy in your design check out this post, Understanding Hierarchy in Design.

Why You Should Always List Freelance Jobs And Projects On Your Resume

When presenting your skill set and work history, its essential to know what to include or exclude. As weve mentioned, you want to tailor your resume to the project or job youre applying for rather than using a generic resume.

For example, suppose youre crafting a resume for a programming job. In that case, you might showcase recent programming projects and your experience with relevant programming languages, rather than taking up limited space on the page to discuss your restaurant job from ten years ago.

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Sample For Showing Your Freelance Work On Your Resume

Now lets take a look at a sample for how to list freelance work on resume.

Addison Anderson

13th Main Street, New York 10003 444-2345

CAREER OBJECTIVE

A results-driven freelancer/contract manager, with a variety of professional experiences from creating a blog to heading an award-winning team of realtors looking for a part-time or permanent position with a top firm.

CORE QUALIFICATIONS

• Managed a successful social media campaign that helped a beverage company double its sales within 6 months.
• Organized and led a real estate sales team that almost doubled its client base within a year.
• Founded and run a tech blog and managed a staff of 15 freelancers.
• Having sound interpersonal skills able to harmonize and manage personnel in a variety of business positions, both online and offline.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

1. XYZ MARKETING, Albany, New York

Social Media Campaign Manager August 2015-Present

Managed to secure a blue verified badge for the companys Twitter feed by creating engaging, targeted, retweetable, tweets in support of its renowned Whos that? ad campaign.

2. ABC REAL ESTATE, New Jersey

Sales Manager May 2010-August 2015

Headed a team of ten agents to record-breaking sales every year for continuously five years.

Researched for new marketing opportunities that helped to boost client base by 8% in the 1st year, 19% in 2nd, 31% in 3rd, and 51% in both the 4th and 5th years.

Titled with Agent of the Year in 2012 and 2013.

3. Blog Founder/Writer/Editor May 2009-Present