Killing A Resume With Too Many Temp Jobs |
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If you want to see how different companies work and you want a better chance of getting a full time job with them, you can use temping for that purpose. But, be careful, as temping can really kill your resume. When you do temping for more than 2-3 months, you have the problem of not knowing how to explain the larger number of small jobs you did. The problem is that you can’t eliminate them completely from the resume. The future employer needs to know that you did something and not just sat on your behind in that period of time. If you have a choice between putting in your resume a gap or a number of temp jobs, go with the temps. Still, there is no need to list every single temp job you had in the past. In my case it would’ve been especially hard, since I had weeks when I had up to five employers in a single week. Resume experts can see this issue on a regular basis, with temping being a large part of people’s lives. Out of the entire workforce in the US, 2.5 million are employed temporarily. This number comes from the statistics of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. From 2002 until now, almost half of the jobs created in the private sector were of the temp variety. If a large part of your experience comes from temping, there are a number of ways you can fix your resume. One way to deal with it is to list all the temp jobs as just one, the contract you had with the temp agency. This way, it looks like you had only one job, instead of looking like you just jumped from one company to another. If an employer thinks that you can’t commit to a job they will not ask you to work for them. Experts say that the resume should list all the skills that people get during their temping period, and they should be quite a few since they work in a variety of environments and companies. They also say that the resume should have the period of time you worked in different companies and what you did there. If you do it right, a string of temp jobs can also mean that you did good and that’s why the temp agency kept you working and sending you to different jobs. One thing to keep in mind is that the bullet points of the resume need to list the accomplishments that you had, not the duties. Some people might say that they updated a list of emails for a company, while other will say that they finished an assignment that took six weeks and was extended by the company. One thing that temp workers should avoid is to keep the descriptions of those many jobs too long. The descriptions should be small and the information should explain things that are not obvious. One example of these descriptions is for a technician that worked for 10 years and doesn’t need to tell employers that they can plug in a printer. It’s obvious that after 10 years they know how to do that, so putting it on the resume is not needed. When working on your resume, make sure each bullet point that lists information deserves to be there and helps you to be hired. You don’t need to annoy the recruiter with every single detail of your past jobs. Tell them what they’re interested in and look at the big picture. Lastly, if the resume still has some space that needs to be filled, you can use it to create a “Selected Assignments” area. In this area you can write down the best companies that you worked for and what you did for them. When you had a lot of temp jobs, experts recommend you to add the temp agency as the company that you worked for. |