How to represent freelancing/contract work?

Question

Hi there,

I worked in consulting for around 1.5 years after graduation, at which point I left my job in order to pursue a startup idea. While the startup idea failed, I amassed a few different clients for strategy and marketing consulting and have been doing that for the past 2.5 years.

Two of these years have been exclusively on contract with one single company, an advertising agency, and I've worked mainly for one client, a large automotive company, but also for a couple other big name clients. One of my recommendations will be from one of these clients as well.

How do I represent my employment history most accurately? Should I say I freelanced for 1/2 a year and then say I moved on to the advertising agency? Or should I say I was freelancing the entire time?

Thanks so, so much in advance. 
Best, 
K

P.S. I'm planning on applying to HBS, GSB, Columbia, Northwestern and Booth, ideally all first round.

VeritasPrepDozie · Answer

Did you form a business entity around this work? Either way I would house all of your freelance work in the employment section under one header as separate bullets within the same header, if you want to include a sub-header with dates of each engagement that may make sense as well. So for your employment section of your resume would have three headers: your formal consulting job, startup, and your freelance header housing all of your work there

ka2727 · Answer

This is really helpful! Thank you so much!!

How to represent freelancing/contract work?

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