Independent contractors and consultants often find it difficult to prepare a resume because of their disjointed work history. They tend to have lots of short-term jobs, which usually results in a resume that violates two of the main principles of effective resume writing. They are:

Length: A candidate that has numerous contracts or consulting engagements over a 10-year period will want to capture all of them (particularly when they insist on including the month and year of the engagement), which can generate a resume that is five or more pages in length.
Longevity: Most job seekers will list the company the contract was with as the "employer" because is it often a company that many will immediately recognize. Although it is important to include brand-name companies on a resume, as they do carry a lot of weight to recruiters, HR reps, and hiring managers, the negative impact the apparent choppiness of experience can have far outweighs the benefit of listing the jobs in this manner.
How Do I Create a Resume for Contract Positions?

As a consultant or contractor, developing a resume for another contract-based position will be more simple than developing a resume for an in-house, corporate position. Recruiters and hiring professionals experienced in the consulting or contracting arena will expect many job entries that are short in duration on a candidate's resume. As such, you can craft your resume in a manner that highlights your more high-profile engagements as well as those in which you have some special achievement to call out. Longevity should not be a major issue in this type of resume, just length. You want to be sure that the resume is not too long, which can cause the reader to lose interest and bypass you entirely.

How Do I Go from a Contract or Consulting Position to an In-house Position?

Developing a resume for an in-house position when the bulk of your experience is in consulting or independent contracting is the real issue at hand here. Don't worry. There are ways to communicate your key strengths and accomplishments while meeting the length and longevity expectations of corporate hiring professionals. Remember, HR representatives are the first group to review your resume, and they look for certain "red flags" to eliminate candidates right off the bat, which is somewhat reasonable as they usually have hundreds of resumes to go through. Two of the major "red flags" are employment gaps and whether the candidate is a job hopper.

If you list only some of the contracts you have had, it could very well leave holes in your experience time line. Again, if you include everything, the resume will be way too long. To overcome both issues, list the consulting or contracting firm you worked through, or, if self-employed, the name of your firm (if you did not have a formal name, simply add "Services" or "Professional Services" after your last name to represent your company name) for the main position heading. This is an umbrella entry that should indicate the time period of your contracting history. Then simply provide a general overview of what you did, saving individual engagements for the bulleted list.

If you worked for many different contracting or consulting organizations, my recommendation is to make the umbrella listing with the date range for your position as a consultant. Then you can have a sub-heading that mentions the different consulting or contracting firms you worked with during that time frame. This way, you can combine most things, if not everything, into this one main entry. Provide a basic overview of your duties, like discovery, analyzing customer needs, developing solutions, recommending strategies, etc. and then list major engagements and their positive outcomes in the bulleted list.

I guarantee this approach will help get your resume through the initial reviews performed by corporate HR folks by overcoming some of the "red flags" that derail so many contractors and consultants when looking to switch to an in-house type of position.

So who am I anyway? Why do I think my advice is so valuable?

My name is Stephen Van Vreede. My company is called No Stone Unturned, and I have been in the career consulting business since 2002 with 8 years of hiring experience prior to that. You can check out my website that offers tools such as the No Nonsense Job Search Strategy guide and other Job Search Tips. http://sites.google.com/a/nononsensejobsearch.com/info/

The short story is that I have an MBA in Marketing from Villanova University and a dual B.S. degree in Finance & Logistics from the University of Maryland. I am a certified professional rsum writer (CPRW) and a member of the Professional Association of Rsum Writers and Career Coaches (PARW/CC). As I mentioned, I paid my dues in the corporate world eventually running a large-scale call center for a major truck rental company, and I have spent the past 6 years with No Stone Unturned, assisting job seekers in achieving their goals.

I know that my products will work for you because they are based on commonsense principles leveraged with good, solid expertise and knowledge of the job search process. After working with countless job seekers, I have become more and more convinced that most of them do not properly prepare for a job search and rely way too much on online sites and trendy articles to tell them what to do. Thus, they waste a lot of time, money, and energy.

If you still aren't sure whether our services are right for you, feel free to give me a call toll-free at 1-866-755-9800 or e-mail me at steve(at)nononsensejobsearch.com