I work on the basis that a year or two of temporary jobs after redundancy (about 12 years ago) and few years of crappy jobs after i left school (longer ago than i care to admit) can be summarised with a sentence or two rather than listing them in as much detail as 'proper' jobs.
Some employers specifically ask for the last 10 years' (or whatever) employment history.
There's been one or two odd occasions where I've wanted to use one of the temporary jobs as a selling point, in which case I'll adjust the CV slightly for that application.
or is that something for the covering letter / personal statement thing?
I'd say so, yes. Although potentially include in key skills section/sidebar too.
I tend to pick out the essential skills from the person specification and mention those in the covering letter. So my covering letter tends to be along the lines of.
"Dear [name of recruiter/department head],
Job title - my name
Please find enclosed my CV in application for the above role, as advertised [where]. In summary, I meet your requirements for the role as follows:
* I have five years experience as a widget-maker, including making widgets for Company X.
* While working at Company X, I was promoted to senior widget-maker and my responsibilities included training new starters, interns and junior colleagues, and then providing ongoing feedback and support to enable staff to learn new skills and tasks and continually improve.
* As senior widget-maker, I attended weekly meetings at Company X, as the departmental representative, providing updates on various projects, and then debriefing my team and assigning tasks afterwards, which involved planning, delegating, monitoring progress and ensuring we achieved the required outcomes.
Achievement: I was acting up as assistant manager when my line manager was on annual leave and successfully dealt with this challenge.
* My role as a Something or Other at Company Y required Skills B and C. My team won an internal award for our work on a project beta-testing some new software and reviewing/editing the draft user guidelines, before the portal went live, on schedule.
* While I haven't yet used [software mentioned in person spec/job ad], I am very computer literate and quick to learn, with transferrable skills having used Software X, Software Y and Software Z in my current and previous roles.
[A couple of sentences explaining why you want the role and/or why you want to work for that organisation.]"
It can be tricky if their person specification lists 15-20 essential and desirable skills. In which case, I might go back to the job ad as there might be 3-5 bullet points listing the main responsibilities of the role, in which case, I'd mirror those and tailor bullet points to reflect those rather than the essential/desirable criteria.
However, I'd mirror their language to help get past keyword filters if they use those in shortlisting. So if the person specification said something about preparing presentations using Microsoft 365, I'd mention that specifically, even if I hadn't used it, as in the example above emphasising computer literacy and transferrable skills.
There are lots of job vacancies where candidates don't meet 100 per cent of the criteria, but if an algorithm is going to reject your application because you said presentation software or PowerPoint or Canva rather than Microsoft 365, that's annoying.
In many ways, the recruitment process doesn't necessarily find the best candidate for the job in terms of who would best be able to do the job, but the best candidate in terms of jumping through the hoops in the process, playing buzzword bingo in the application, performing best at interview, neither of which are guarantees that someone will be able to do the job, or do it well.
