Interview Tips >Should You Remove Jobs You Held Short Term on Your Resume?
Resumes are your chance to sell yourself to a company. You want to make sure that the employer knows the experiences you have that should win you the position. It is like a sales letter for your employment.
Like a sales letter, you should only include the features that are going to win you the job. You have a limited amount of space to try to win over the recipient, and you need to use that space as wisely and as impressively as possible.
Lots of Short Jobs
It is not uncommon to find that you have a number of different jobs that you held for only a short amount of time, especially if you are a young worker that was employed through college. It is tempting to want to add these jobs to your resume. Most of the time you should not. Employment that you held for less than a year does not always speak highly to your value as a candidate:
- Short term employment makes it look like you can’t hold down a job.
- Multiple positions make it look like your career has no focus.
- Temporary positions do not appear to be great job experiences.
Ideally, you should only list either the most recent or longest term jobs you have held.
When to Remove Jobs
You should remove these jobs from your resume when they meet any of the following criteria:
- They are irrelevant for the position.
- Removing them will not cause a massive gap in employment.
- You have held several jobs for a longer period of time.
- You do not have any major accomplishments at these positions.
As you can see, most of the time you will remove these jobs from your resume. However, there may a reason to keep the job on your resume. Perhaps one of your short term jobs is your only job that was relevant for the position. When that is the case you should consider switching to a skill based resume, or doing your best to make it appear as though you held the position for longer (perhaps by removing the months from the “time employed” section of your resume so that employers cannot see how long you were actually employed, only the year(s) you were employed.
There are very few instances where you will want to place short term positions on your resume. See if you can omit them without affecting your job chances, and look at skill based resumes or fancy workarounds if you are convinced that listing the job is necessary.
Take Away Interview Tips
- Short term employment is not very useful on a resume.
- Omit any jobs that will not help your chances.
Related posts: