Hey guys,<p>Just started out full time contract work this year with some great success. I've worked on some very well known web sites.<p>Is it ok for me to list these websites in my resume? Do you guys do this? Including these projects in my resume would make it much more impressive and would lend me a great amount of credibility to potential contracts that I'm looking for.<p>On the other hand I'm not sure if this would be a breach of an NDA agreement or not. And what if I haven't signed an NDA?<p>My rule of thumb has been to only talk about projects that I've worked on that could be deduced from publicly availible information, but I'm not sure even this is ok.<p>Thanks for any feedback you can give me!
I am not contracting at this point, but I have done a lot of it in my past.<p>The answer is, it depends on what the NDA & your contract says. Generally in my contracts I used to always have a clause that allowed me to say who and what project I was working on, and it overrode the NDA for that sole purpose. There were a few exceptions when a project was stealth of course which is fine.<p>Mine basically spelled out what I could say, basically it was generally: who, what, when and basic goals. Outside of that and you have to get permission usually. I also still to this day don't list them on my resume by name, but instead by basic details. When I talk with people I will say who/what and that lets them know I have the chops which can be validated through contracts or references in certain cases. To be fair, usually the talks come first then if they need further due diligence they see my resume. When I was contracting it was super rare anyone on my team had to produce a resume for clients, except for the largest of clients who wanted more to vet and frankly to get them in their contact list to try and poach them later. No matter what was in the contract about anti poaching, every person who produced a resume would suddenly find themselves in headhunters sites or in corporate recruiting systems (mine included sometimes).
I work in live events and frequently see people list specific events they have worked on in their resume. While this isn't an apples to apples comparison, it has some merit. Generally, it's not useful for me to know that you worked on something a few years ago. What I care more about is a narrative of impactful work across a number of projects, whether small, large or in between.<p>If someone violates an NDA to tout their contribution on a project it is an immediate turn off as it shows a breach of trust before we even have had a conversation.<p>It's likely that over the course of n projects, a contractor was 'over hired' and 'under hired' some amount of times. Seeing a trend of consistent placement in their past work helps me know that they have an area of focus and expertise that I can capitalize on as well. This means they will have a high level of efficiency in the work that I need them to do. Given this, seeing that narrative played out in the resume is important.