On a resume, how should freelancers arrange their projects in the most competitive way possible?
With certain HR cultures still fixated on job experience in terms of past roles had rather than skillsets possessed, I feel many freelancers, like myself, have encountered a brick wall when it comes to packaging their CVs competitively when they try to shift to formal employment.
Despite my IT profession, one of my jobs after graduating from university was as a hospitality business launch consultant. My initial responsibility was to handle the company's branding. Following a recommendation from a prior customer and a lengthy talk with the business owner, he chose to take a chance on me to oversee the entire project from conception to completion, and subsequently went on to say that I was the best person for the management job.
Over the years, its success has resulted in several freelance consulting possibilities for comparable organizations in the hospitality industry.
I've wondered how relevant these consulting gigs in hospitality are to the desired careers the few times I've tried looking for formal employment in Marketing-related professions. And, in most cases, I would remove these experiences from my resume, making it appear as if I had been unemployed for a period of time.
Enrolling in #CIM worked its magic on me, and I realized that marketing is more than just promotion and advertising. I realized it was all marketing when I was designing logos, choosing the correct colors, crafting menus and pricing menu items, and selecting the quality coffee and kitchen equipment on the market. Aiming for uniqueness meant researching my competition and targeting customers, training my team in customer service, creating SOPs and ensuring that everyone on my team understands them, listening to my customers for feedback, ensuring that there is some coffee aroma in the coffee section, and getting changed money to my cashiers on time. It wasn't until then that I realized the importance of the 7Ps (Place, Promotion, Product, Price, Process, People, and Physical Evidence) and realized how effective my hospitality freelancing jobs were in molding me into a customer-focused marketer.
But knowing is one thing; making my preferred employer grasp this precisely through my CV is quite another. And this brings me back to my original question: how can one arrange his or her freelancing jobs in a CV in such a way that they are competitive for the desired job opportunity?