Temping and the Road ahead
How to Handle Consulting, Freelance, Temporary or Non-Paid Work on Your Resume    By Kate Wendleton, 

Work is work. Experience is experience. It does not matter whether or not you were paid, or how you were paid--on payroll, as a consultant or through an intermediary firm.

If you are performing work for a certain company but are being paid through an intermediary company, such as a temporary services firm, do not put the name of the intermediary firm on your resume unless it is in your best interest to do so.

Companies make arrangements with intermediary firms for their own reasons, and those negotiations should not affect the way you position yourself on your resume.

For example, Sharon is working full time as a project manager at IBM. The project is expected to last for four years. She reports to people at IBM, works with people there and even manages IBMers. But she was hired by, and is paid by, a temporary services firm (and receives no benefits, by the way). Which firm should she put on her resume: the temporary services firm, or IBM? IBM is where she works. The temporary services firm is merely a middleman, and the work she does has nothing to do with them. Therefore, she should indicate that she served as a project manager for IBM. Which company actually pays her--or whether she gets paid at all--is not a resume issue.

Here's another example: John was the manager of the mailroom at his company. The company outsourced the mail function, which means that it was now being handled by an outside firm. John stayed in exactly the same place, doing exactly the same job, working with exactly the same people as he had in the past. However, his paychecks now came from the outsourcing company instead of the place where he worked. Do not disrupt your resume just because your company decides to handle its finances in a certain way. What if the company John worked for now decided to use a different outsourcing firm? Should he list three different companies on his resume when he hasn't moved at all? Of course not.

In the same vein, many people gain experience by doing volunteer work. Sydney wanted to learn a new programming language. He received a severance package from his former employer and decided to quickly get some real-life experience by doing exactly this kind of work for a major corporation--for free. He said to the hiring manager: "There is no risk on your part. You get someone to work for free for a few months, and I get new experience to put on my resume." Sydney was "hired."On his resume, Sydney noted in his summary that he was using the new programming language and stated that he was doing consulting work for this major corporation. In fact, Sydney did the work just so he could put it on his resume. (If you feel funny saying that you are doing consulting work when you are not getting paid, then ask the company to pay you a token amount.)

This holds true for other volunteer work you may have done throughout your life. For example, I ran The Five O'Clock Club for many years without getting paid (by my choice, all the money went to other workers). Even though I did not get paid, the experience still counted, and I happily put it on my resume.

If you have had a number of short-term consulting assignments during a given timeframe, it is still usually better to list the companies for which you did the work rather than the company that paid you. The sample below shows how one very successful job hunter did it.

By the way, you can use this same technique if you had a number of short-term, on-payroll jobs. Just combine them so you don't have a long list of dates.