Can You Put Side Hustles on Your Resume? Yes, But Not Like That

The short version: yes, you can put a side hustle on your resume, and often you should, because it shows initiative, real skills, and results a hiring manager can picture. The catch is that most people write it wrong, listing the hustle like a hobby instead of a job, and that's exactly why it gets ignored or held against them.

I've sat on the other side of a lot of hiring processes over the years, reviewing CVs for my own team and for clients who ask me to sit in on interviews when they're building out a marketing function. I've seen side hustles help a candidate get shortlisted and I've seen them quietly sink one. Same idea, completely different execution. Let me walk you through both.

The short answer: yes, but with rules

A side hustle belongs on your resume when it demonstrates a skill relevant to the job you want, when it has some kind of measurable result, and when you can talk about it in an interview without sounding defensive. That's it. Three conditions. If your side hustle fails all three, leave it off. If it hits one or two, think carefully about where you put it and how much space it gets.

What it should never be is a confession. I mean that literally. I've read CVs where someone writes "Uber driver, weekends, 2023 to present" with nothing else, as if they're admitting to something rather than describing a business they ran that involved customer service, route planning, cash handling, and five star ratings from actual paying customers. That's not a confession. That's a case study, badly told.

A real story about a CV that almost got binned

A few years back I was helping a client hire a social media coordinator for a small retail business in the Midlands. One candidate, a woman in her late twenties, had a two year gap in her formal employment history and a single line at the bottom of her CV that said "Etsy shop owner, handmade jewellery." Nothing else. My client's initial reaction was to move on, because the CV looked thin and the gap looked unexplained.

I asked her to bring the candidate in anyway, because that one line was doing a lot of unpaid work. In the interview it turned out she'd built the Etsy shop from nothing to roughly 400 pounds a month in consistent sales, ran her own Instagram account with 6,000 followers, wrote her own product descriptions, handled every customer complaint herself, and had taught herself basic Canva design and simple paid ads on a budget of about 20 pounds a week. None of that was on the CV. She got the job, and eighteen months later she was running the company's entire content calendar.

The lesson isn't "always mention your Etsy shop." The lesson is that a one line mention with zero detail is worse than not mentioning it at all, because it invites the reader to fill in the gap with assumptions, and most people fill gaps with the worst case scenario. If you're going to put it on the page, put enough on the page that nobody has to guess.

Where to put it

There are three honest places for a side hustle on a resume, and picking the wrong one is the most common mistake I see.

• Under Experience, as its own entry, if it's substantial, ongoing, and clearly relevant. Treat it exactly like a job: title, dates, three or four bullet points with outcomes.
• Under a separate "Projects" or "Additional Experience" section, if it's smaller or more occasional but still shows a transferable skill.
• Nowhere at all, if it has no connection to the role and no impressive number attached to it. Dog walking for pocket money doesn't need a slot on a marketing manager's CV unless you built a booking system, ran local Facebook ads for it, and grew it to 15 regular clients, at which point it's suddenly relevant again because that's operations and marketing experience.

What I'd never do is bury it in a "Hobbies and Interests" section at the bottom next to "enjoys hiking." That section signals leisure. A side hustle is work, even unpaid or low paid work, and it deserves to sit where work sits.

How to write the bullet points

Numbers do the heavy lifting here, more than almost anywhere else on your CV, because a side hustle has no company name to lend it credibility. The name won't impress anyone. The result might.

• Weak: "Ran a freelance writing side hustle in the evenings."
• Better: "Built a freelance writing side hustle to 900 pounds a month within eight months, working with six recurring clients across ecommerce and finance niches."
• Weak: "Sold products online."
• Better: "Grew an online shop from zero to 45 orders a month, managed all customer service and returns, and kept a 4.8 star average rating across 200 reviews."

If you're stuck for the writing skills side of this, it's worth reading about how freelance writers find and grow side jobs, because the same structure, treating the work as a real client relationship with real deliverables, is what makes a CV bullet point convincing rather than vague.

The uncomfortable part nobody wants to say out loud

Here's the bit that most advice on this topic skips over. Some hiring managers do not like side hustles, and it isn't always fair, but it's real, and pretending it isn't real doesn't help you write a better CV.

There are two specific worries a hiring manager sometimes has, even if they never say it in the interview. First, that your side hustle is where your real ambition and energy is going, and the day job is just the thing that pays your rent while you build the other thing. Second, and this one comes up more with anything that could be seen as a competitor, that you might use company time, contacts, or knowledge to grow it. I've heard both of these said plainly by managers I've worked with, usually after the interview, never to the candidate's face.

The fix isn't to hide the hustle. It's to frame it as evidence you're capable of doing exactly what the job requires, initiative, ownership, follow through, rather than as evidence you're planning your exit before you've even started. If your side hustle directly competes with the employer's business, that's a different conversation and you should have it honestly in the interview rather than let it surface later. If it doesn't compete, say so, briefly and confidently, and move on to what it proves about your skills.

Which side hustles help, ranked by how convincing they are

Not all side hustles carry the same weight on a CV. From reviewing hundreds of them over the years, here's roughly how they land:

• Strongest: freelance work in your target field (writing, design, social media management, bookkeeping), consulting, or a business you built with real customers and measurable revenue.
• Solid: content creation with a real audience and engagement numbers, tutoring, running a small ecommerce shop, virtual assistant work.
• Situational: gig economy driving or delivery work, useful mainly if you can point to customer service metrics, ratings, or time management under pressure.
• Weakest without extra detail: passive investing, reselling with no clear system, anything you did for under three months with no numbers to show for it.

If you want a wider sense of what's working right now for people building income on the side, I've written up a longer list of side hustles worth trying based on what I've done myself, and it's worth checking against your own before deciding what earns a spot on the CV.

What if you have no traditional experience at all

This is where the calculation changes completely. If you're a new graduate, a career changer, or someone returning to work after years out, a side hustle can be the single strongest thing on your CV, because it's proof of initiative when you have nothing else concrete to point to. I'd go further than most advice here: if you're at this stage, don't just mention the side hustle, lead with it.

Structure the CV so the side hustle experience sits near the top of your Experience section, described with the same seriousness as any paid role, dates included, results included. There's a good breakdown of how to build a CV from a thin work history over on the page about realistic resume templates for people with no traditional experience, and the underlying idea is the same one I keep repeating here: treat the hustle like a job because in every way that matters, it was one.

A note for people in structured or public sector roles

If you're applying somewhere that reads CVs against a strict competency framework, teaching being the clearest example, the calculation shifts again. Panels reading teacher applications are usually looking for specific, curriculum linked evidence, not general entrepreneurial spirit, so a side hustle only earns its place if you can tie it directly to a classroom relevant skill, running a tutoring business that improved pupils' exam results, for instance, rather than an unrelated hustle included just to look well rounded. There's a detailed guide on what to include on a teacher's CV to impress a hiring panel that's worth reading before you decide whether your side income even belongs on that particular application.

The step by step version

If you want the short process rather than the reasoning, here it is:

• Step 1: List every side hustle you've done in the last three years, however small.
• Step 2: Cross out any with no measurable result and no relevance to the job you're applying for.
• Step 3: For each one left, write down the number that proves it worked, revenue, followers, clients, ratings, hours saved, whatever it is.
• Step 4: Decide its home on the CV, main Experience section, separate Projects section, or nowhere.
• Step 5: Write two to four bullet points per hustle, using the same format you'd use for a real job.
• Step 6: Prepare a fifteen second spoken version for the interview, because if it's on the page, someone will ask about it.

That sixth step trips people up more than the CV itself. I've watched candidates write a confident line about their side business and then go completely vague the moment an interviewer asks a follow up question. If you can't answer "how many customers did you have" or "what would you do differently" without stumbling, either put more work into the story before the interview or take the line off the CV.

One last thought on timing

If you're currently building something on the side and thinking about how it might eventually replace your main income rather than sit alongside it, that's a slightly different question, and it's worth reading about turning existing skills into something more lasting, like the ideas in this piece on building income from skills you already have, before you decide how much of it belongs on a job application at all. Sometimes the honest answer is that you're not applying for the job to build a career there, you're applying for it to fund the thing you want to build, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it changes how much detail you want a future employer to have.

Frequently asked questions

Will listing a side hustle make me look disloyal to a future employer?

It can if you handle it badly, describing it vaguely or letting it dominate the CV in a way that suggests your attention is elsewhere. Framed, with clear results and no suggestion of a conflict with the employer's business, it reads as initiative rather than disloyalty in almost every case I've seen.

Should I mention a side hustle that failed?

Yes, if you learned something specific and can say what it was in one sentence. "Closed after eight months because I underestimated shipping costs, now I always model logistics before pricing" is a stronger line than most successful hustles get, because it shows judgement, not just effort.

Do gig economy jobs like delivery driving count as a side hustle worth including?

They count when you attach a real number to them, ratings, tenure, or a specific skill like route efficiency or customer service under pressure. Without a number, they read as filler rather than experience.

How much space should a side hustle take up on the CV?

No more than three or four bullet points, ever, unless it's your strongest piece of experience and you have very little else to compete with it. The goal is proof, not a full life story.

Useful references

• the National Careers Service advice pages