From my experience in my current job as a hiring manager, I’ve seen that it is almost always a bad idea in any interview to say that you are unemployed, or to have a gap on your resume from your last job to now. This tells the interviewer unconsciously that nobody else wants to hire you so they don’t want to hire you either. It’s a steep uphill climb from there.

But…the beautiful thing for you is that it is a very fine line between unemployed and self-employed. It’s your choice to cross that line. No hiring manager can stop you. Saying that you are self-employed always looks better on a resume than unemployed.

How do you become self-employed? It’s surprisingly simple. Pick something you’re passionate about that is closely related to the job you’re applying for. Set up a couple social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, etc. so that a hiring manager can find evidence of your business if he or she goes looking for it. Create a blog about your business, write a couple articles, and post links to them on your social media sites. Take 10 minutes to join a website like oDesk.com and start bidding on jobs related to your new business. Set up an account with Square so that you can start taking payments from a mobile device or through your blog. Call your ten best friends and tell them about it. Ask them if they want to be your first clients.

Congrats! You’re now self-employed.

Guess how much this all cost? Zip. You just set up a business for free, and now your getting experience in the job field where you’re trying to get hired, and you can talk about it in your next interview. Pretty cool, huh?

If you’re ready to go from unemployed to temporarily self-employed, let’s talk.