Eighteen months of delivering takeaways on a bike is eighteen months of work. People still leave it off their CV, or dress it up as "urban logistics consultant", and both choices cost them. Platform work belongs on the page in most cases. What it needs is plain, honest framing.
Should you list it at all?
Usually, yes. A hiring manager who sees an empty year tends to assume the worst, and a line saying you drove thirty hours a week for a ride-hailing app is a far better answer than silence. List it when any of these is true:
- It fills a period that would otherwise be blank.
- It ran long enough to show reliability, say six months or more of regular hours.
- It connects to the job you want: driving, logistics, customer contact, anything that needs a licence.
- It is the most recent thing you did, so it is the first thing a reader looks for.
Leave it off, or shrink it to a single line, when it was a few weekends next to a full-time role and adds nothing to this application. A handful of Saturday shifts in 2021 does not deserve space a stronger entry could use. Work held alongside a main job raises its own questions, and that is a separate topic.
One opinion: embarrassment is the worst reason to cut it. Recruiters in retail, hospitality, warehousing and transport know exactly what app work involves, and plenty of them respect it.
When you do list it, put it in the main work history at its proper date. Not in a catch-all "other" section at the bottom, where it looks like something you hoped nobody would read.
The title and employer line
Most mistakes happen here. In many countries, platform couriers and drivers work as self-employed contractors: a sole trader in the UK, a 1099 independent contractor in the US. That is not universal. Worker-status rules differ by country, they are changing in several of them, and nothing here is legal or tax advice. Write what your own paperwork says.
The pattern that works is your status and role first, then "via" the platform type or its name.
- Self-employed delivery courier, via food delivery apps
- Independent private hire driver, via ride-hailing platforms
- Self-employed tasker (furniture assembly and removals), via a task app
Naming the platform is fine and often useful. "Via Uber Eats" tells a reader what you did in three words. What you cannot do is put the platform in the employer slot as though it hired you when it did not. A reference check goes nowhere, and the mismatch looks like dishonesty even when it was only carelessness. The reverse also holds: if you really were an employee, which some platforms and some countries do arrange, say so just as plainly.
Do not inflate the title. "Last-mile operations manager", "mobility consultant" and "CEO" of a one-person delivery account all read as cover for something the writer is ashamed of. "Delivery courier" is a real job title. Use it.
Numbers the app already counted for you
Gig work has a rare advantage: the platform recorded everything. These are the honest figures, the ones you can normally find in your own account:
- Completed deliveries, rides or tasks
- Average customer rating
- Acceptance rate and on-time rate, where the app shows them
- Months active
- Typical hours per week
Copy the numbers as they appear, and round down. "Over 2,400 deliveries" is right for 2,437. Leave earnings out; they tell an employer little and start the wrong conversation.
Hours per week matter more than people expect. "Full-time" means nothing on an app where you log on when you like. "About 30 hours a week" tells the reader how serious the commitment was. And if your rating was unremarkable, you are not obliged to quote it. Volume and duration can carry the entry alone.
Take a screenshot of your statistics screen today. Accounts get closed, dashboards get redesigned, and lifetime totals can become unreachable once you stop working. A dated screenshot may be the only proof you have if an interviewer asks. They rarely do. Knowing it is on your phone still changes how confidently you talk about the figure.
If the app never showed you a metric, do not invent one. "Regular evening and weekend shifts for 14 months" is a perfectly good line with no rating attached.
Several apps, one entry
Most couriers run two or three apps at once. Listing each one separately looks like job-hopping and wastes lines. Group them: one entry, one date range, the platforms named in the title or the first bullet. Adding the totals together is fine as long as you say they are combined.
Here is a worked entry for delivery:
Self-employed delivery courier, via two food delivery apps
Manchester, March 2023 to September 2024
- Completed over 3,100 deliveries across both apps, by bicycle and later by moped
- Held an average customer rating of 4.9 out of 5 and an on-time rate above 95 percent
- Worked 25 to 30 hours a week, mostly evening and weekend peaks
- Managed my own schedule, equipment and vehicle maintenance with no supervisor
And one for ride-hailing:
Independent private hire driver, via ride-hailing platforms
Leeds, 2022 to 2024
- 4,200 completed trips with an average rating of 4.92
- Licensed private hire driver, clean licence throughout
- Regular airport and station runs, including night shifts
If you did two different kinds of work, say driving passengers and assembling furniture, split them only when both are relevant to the application.
Covering a gap or a period of study
The dates do most of the work. Between two jobs, the gig entry takes its place in the chronology and the gap simply stops existing. During a degree, it shows you paid your way and held a schedule on top of coursework. One line can be enough: "Self-employed courier alongside full-time degree, 15 hours a week, 2021 to 2024".
You do not owe the page an explanation of why you did it. In an interview, one sentence settles the matter: "I was made redundant in January and drove for a platform while I looked for the right role." Then move on. Over-explaining is what makes it sound like a problem.
What a hiring manager reads into it
Nobody hires for "carried food across town". They hire for what it proves:
- Self-management. No supervisor and no rota. You chose your hours and then kept them.
- Punctuality, measured by the app to the minute.
- Customer contact: doorstep handovers, addresses that do not exist, complaints you had to absorb politely.
- Local knowledge: streets, loading bays, which blocks have no lift.
- Peak periods: Friday nights, heavy rain, match days.
- A clean driving record, if it is true and the job cares.
Keep the ones the target job asks for and drop the rest. Six soft skills in a row read like a list copied from somewhere.
Tailoring it to the target job
- Logistics and warehouse roles: volumes, on-time rate, route planning, the vehicle you used.
- Customer service: the rating, the number of customer contacts in a shift, problems solved at the door.
- Sales: the link is less obvious but it exists. Your income depended entirely on your own activity, with no base pay, and you talked to strangers all day.
- Anything requiring a licence: licence category, how long you have held it, no claims or penalties. Full-time professional driving has CV conventions of its own.
- Office or graduate roles: two lines, no more. The dates and the steadiness are the message.
Wording to avoid
- The platform written as your employer when you had no employment contract with it
- Inflated titles such as "urban mobility expert" or "operations lead"
- "Founder" or "entrepreneur" for an account on an app, when "self-employed" says it accurately
- Figures rounded up, or figures nobody could check
- The apologetic register: "just a stopgap", "only to pay the bills"
- The platform's in-house vocabulary, which means little to anyone outside the app
Tonight, open the app and screenshot the statistics screen. Then write one entry on the pattern status, role, "via" platform, with two or three figures under it. If you build your CV from your LinkedIn profile with a tool such as Postulit, add the entry to the profile first under the same title, so the two documents match when a recruiter compares them.