How to List Your Volunteering Work on Your Resume

Your resume is your bloodline in the realm of professional hiring, it’s something we can’t live without. Resumes are often bloated by many to showcase all of their skills, but depending on who’s doing the hiring, too much can oftentimes be a bad thing–but can the same be said for volunteer work? We personally believe that showcasing your volunteering experience over smaller soft skills can be a huge benefit and lean in your favor when it comes time for interviews. 

In this quick guide, we’ll walk you through the process of listing your volunteering experience on your resume and explaining why it’s important to list it. Ready? Let’s jump in! 

Why Volunteer Experience Matters to Employers

“If volunteering organizations accept anyone, why would my experience matter to potential employers?” This is a question we see all the time, and the truth of the matter is: your time isn’t free. Your time is very important and valuable, and employers know this.

As you can imagine, more often than not, people who volunteer are not doing it for their resume; the vast majority of volunteers typically volunteer for an emotional reason, and these reasons can demonstrate your value to employers.

The short answer to why volunteering experience matters to employers is that you’re demonstrating that you’re placing your passion above your time, and doing something greater for others than for yourself.

The honest reality is that volunteering experience likely won’t land you the job, but it’ll support their reasons to hire you. They’ll learn more about you and your interests from your volunteer experience, whereas other jobs might just tell them what experience you have in a specific skillset. Volunteer experience demonstrates so much more than what you did, it shows the employer who you are, which, if you’re volunteering, you’re pretty awesome in our book.

When to Include Volunteering on Your Resume

Should you always include volunteering experience on your resume? Should you ever exclude it? 

In an earlier section, we briefly discussed bloated resumes, ones with too many soft skills listed that could just make the resume feel overloaded and overwhelming. While soft skills are great, listing a bunch of them doesn’t tell the hiring person anything special. In general, the best practice is to always ensure your resume is relevant and short. Only specific industries prefer resumes longer than one page. 

The truth is, if you’ve volunteered for any amount of time, you should add it to your resume. It’s important, and again, it shows employers more about who you are than what you can do. Plus, the more closely related the volunteer work is to the job or organization, the better! Adding volunteer work is not something a lot of other potential job candidates do on their resumes, so take advantage of it! 

Where to Place Volunteer Work in Your Resume

Now that we’ve established how important adding volunteer work to your resume is, let’s cover where you should place the volunteer work on your resume.

Your traditional resume reads top to bottom from newest job to the oldest, followed by any certifications, educational credentials, and soft skills. Adding volunteering work to your resume should follow the same format as a traditional resume.

Is your volunteering experience in-between jobs or overlapping? Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter if you volunteered while you had a job, you should still keep it in that linear, chronological order.

Some individuals with a lot of experience may consider creating a separate branch on their resume that is underneath their professional jobs in its own section, simply labeled “Volunteer Experience”. 

Ultimately, the choice is up to you on whether to stack it with job experiences or create a whole new section. When we asked people who work in HR and those who frequently review resumes for their preference, they preferred to read linearly so that they can quickly reference your capacity and find any trends that may work better for the employer. Keep that in mind when you’re adding your experience to your resume.

How to Describe Volunteer Roles Like Professional Experience

Should you be formal or informal when discussing your volunteering experience? Should it sound just like a job? 

The answers to these questions ultimately depend on you and your unique style. 

In our opinion, describing volunteer roles should be a mix of formal and informal, while ensuring that the formatting of the description matches what you have in your other job experiences. 

When we say you should have a mix of formal and informal, we don’t mean you need to talk in first person or third person, it means that you should:

Briefly explain what you did

Sorting Specialist at Mission Fresh Closets 

• Mission Fresh Closets is a nonprofit that provides children in financial need access to clean clothing.
• My volunteer group processed around 3,500 articles of clothing per day of service and sorted the clothing items by size, gender, and color.

Briefly explain why you did it

“My attention to detail made me a great candidate for the volunteer position since they process such a high volume of donated clothing. I am also highly moved by the nonprofit’s mission to provide children in financial need access to clean clothing.”

As you can see from the generalized example above, we’re mixing the tone into both formal and slightly informal. If this was a job experience, it may have looked like this:

Briefly explain what you did

Sorting Specialist at Mission Fresh Closets 

• Processed children’s clothing and sorted them by size, gender and color.
• Processed and tagged 3,500 articles of clothing on average per day.
• Managed the sorting team, with 6 teammates.

….and then you’d likely leave the reason you did it out, because if it’s a traditional job, your answer would likely be money- or career-related.

3 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Listing Volunteering on Your Resume

We’ve discussed how you should be both formal and informal on your volunteering experience you listed on your resume, so how exactly can you make a mistake? Worry not, we’ll walk you through the more common mistakes that individuals make when listing their volunteering experience on their resumes.

1. Lack of Passion

The first mistake many make when listing their volunteer experience on their resume is sticking to the traditional method of showcasing their experience, and not illustrating their passion, like why they are moved by the organization’s mission, for example. 

In a way, we already illustrate our passion in our job experience listings. It’s evident by how we choose to speak about our profession. It’s just a matter of rephrasing or expanding on it. 

In an earlier example, we discussed a non-volunteering experience for a nonprofit that processes new clothes for children in need. It could be changed to:

Sorting Specialist at Mission Fresh Closets 

• Processed children’s clothing and sorted them by size, gender and color.
• Processed and tagged 3,500 articles of clothing on average per day.
• Managed the sorting team, with 6 teammates.
• Continually motivated to work harder and find ways to streamline processes.

This example works if you cannot provide two entries on your experience. If you can have multiple entries, we still suggest following the “what” and “why” methodology (what did you do, why did you do it).

2. Portraying Yourself as a Hero

Another common mistake that many make is trying to impress the employer through self-sacrificial means, such as trying to make themselves out to be a hero. While volunteering certainly is noble, you’re likely not the only one trying to make a difference. Volunteering isn’t about you, it’s about the collective group of volunteers working together towards something larger than yourself.

This can tie back into passion, but more so into showcasing too much passion.

On your resume, finding a positive balance between being the hero and being yourself is crucial for listing your volunteering experience. More often than not, you should consider showcasing the impact, not your impact. To reiterate, it’s more important to showcase what the group did and why you did it with them. 

If you remember the example of Mission Fresh Closets, you may have noticed one word that is not typically used in traditional job experience descriptions: the magical word “we”. Employers want team players, and you’re showing that your impact was collective, that you were a cog in a bigger moving system. Did you single-handedly clothe thousands of kids? Nope! You helped to make it a reality.

Heroes might say something like, “I processed thousands of articles of clothing per day, which ensured that children gained access to the clothes they needed.” The difference ultimately is in the “I” versus the “we”. You may also have noticed that in our ‘why’ section, we transitioned to the first person, and that’s perfectly fine! You’re showing your passion while ensuring you aren’t portraying yourself as the sole hero.

3. Lack of Notable References 

Another common pitfall many make is forgetting to add viable references from volunteering opportunities. We tend to lean more towards paying careers for our references when in reality, your volunteer coordinators, organizers, and fellow volunteers will have a lot more to say about you and your passions than many paying jobs can.

The TLDR is that you should include references from volunteer work, not just paying jobs.

Need to Manage Volunteers? Leverage Golden! 

Whether you’re a volunteer organizer or a volunteer coordinator, Golden’s volunteer management software makes the entire volunteer journey easy. Streamline communications, track hours automatically, and assign schedules to volunteers with ease with Golden. 

Schedule a demo today.