The application asks for work experience. You have never had a job.

It is spring, the pool and the camp down the road are hiring, and the application form has a box for your work experience. You stare at it. You have never had a paying job, so the box looks empty next to whatever the next applicant fills in. But you have not actually done nothing. You babysat, you mowed lawns for two summers, you ran practice for your little brother’s team when the coach could not make it, you kept a neighbor’s garden alive while they were in the hospital. None of that had a paycheck, and all of it is real. This page is the place to keep it before you need it.

Open your page

Checked against the live page and the résumé view it renders. Requirements on this page last reviewed September 28, 2026. The product as it runs today is always the source of truth.

Why “no experience” is not the same as nothing happened

A hiring form asks for jobs because a job is easy to write down: a title, an employer, a date range. What you actually did before your first paycheck rarely comes with a title, so it gets left off, even when it is exactly the kind of thing the person hiring you wants to know: did you show up when you said you would, and did you finish what you started.

An adult who watched you do it can say so. A coach who saw you run practice, a neighbor whose garden you kept, a parent who watched you babysit every Saturday for a year: each one can put their name on it, in their own words, and none of them needed you to be paid for it to be true.

Your page is the experience section, early

Add one thing at a time, whenever it happens, not the night before an application is due: what you did, roughly when, and a line in your own words. Then ask the adult who saw it to sign it. They open a link on their phone, type their name and role, and they are done; no account, nothing to install.

This works the same way before your first job as it does after your fifth. The page does not care whether the thing paid you. It cares whether it is true and whether someone who was there is willing to put their name on it.

When you are ready to apply

Open your page in job order and it groups everything under the same headings a hiring form uses, jobs first, with each entry dated and, where someone signed it, their name attached. Copy the lines straight into the application’s experience box, or hand the whole page to whoever is asking. The unpaid summer with your little brother’s team reads first next to any paid work that follows it, in the same shape, with the same coach’s name attached.

What this does not do

It does not promise you the job. A hiring decision belongs to whoever is hiring. What this does is give you something true to put in the box instead of an empty one.
It does not turn a favor into a job title.Mowing a lawn stays mowing a lawn. Nothing here dresses up what you did; it just makes sure it is written down and dated.
It does not compare you to another applicant.There is no score and no position here, only a dated list of what you actually did.

Frequently asked questions

What counts as something worth adding, if I have never had a job?

Anything an adult actually watched you do and would describe honestly if asked: regular babysitting, yard work, running a practice, tutoring a neighbor, keeping a garden or a pet fed for someone. The test is whether it is true and whether someone was there, not whether it was paid.

What if the adult who saw it is a parent?

A parent can sign, and their relationship to you shows plainly next to their name, so a reader sees exactly who is speaking. A second adult outside your family, when you have one, is a second, independent name on the page, which a parent’s own signature cannot be.

Does this replace the actual job application form?

No. You still fill out whatever form the employer gives you. This is where the answers come from, so you are copying true, dated lines into the box instead of trying to remember them under pressure.

What happens to this once I do get a first job?

It keeps going. The job you get becomes the newest entry, and everything before it stays, in the same order, for the application after this one.

Before the first job, during it, and after

A first job stops looking like a blank box once you can show what came before it. You hold the record the whole way through: before the first paycheck, during it, and for whatever comes next, on the same page, at no cost to you.

Open your page