2009 was a difficult year for anyone involved in the recruitment market. But towards the closing months, I for one had already started to notice some signs of green shoots of recovery. A lot of candidates I spoke with seemed to have several options available to them in December and there was a general mood of optimism that did not exist at the same time in 2008.
I’m not saying we are out of the woods just yet but forecasts for the UK contractor market look much better for a prosperous 2010. And with January now upon us, many candidates will be starting to contact their favoured agencies and running the gauntlet of Jobserve. Let’s face it, if you finished a contract before Christmas you probably decided to write off December with an aim to start looking again in January. With this in mind, I thought now was a good time to blog on some of the do’s and don’ts of writing a CV. I know this is a well-covered topic but many are too generalist and I wanted to write one more specific to contact workers.
I would be interested to hear what contractors and hiring managers think about these points as I would like to think that after reading (probably hundreds of!) thousands of CV’s, I have a pretty good idea of what gets an interview.
Here are my first three tips….
Tip #1 Keep it simple
One of the best pieces of advice I can give is to make sure that your CV is kept simple. Use standard sized text (with no colours apart from black) and steer clear of using tables that are difficult to read or format. As I largely deal with business change candidates I rarely see big skills matrixes; but this is something that makes a CV hard to read and often a lot longer than it should be. Your skills matrix is not supposed to be an exhaustive list of everything you've ever worked with, try to keep it relevant.
Some candidates have told me that creating a long list means they show up on lots of agency searches. Sorry, but in my experience this is not the way to look for a job and often results in receiving a lot of time-wasting calls about inappropriate roles from recruitment agents who don't know the first thing about the position they’re screening for. If a manager has a limited amount of time to look at CV’s, they want to see them in a quick, readable format that doesn’t make their eyes hurt!
Tip #2: Don’t write a book
The length of your CV is also very important. It’s one thing to highlight your experience but writing chapter and verse is quite another. You don’t want to get hung up on shortening your CV so much you end up without enough information for an employer to assess whether you have enough experience either. A one page CV for a Programme Manager with 20+ years experience is not enough and however good you are, demonstrating a track record of delivery in such a short space is impossible. I tend to think three to four pages is about right and should give plenty of scope for getting your experience down concisely. I have often been told that managers tend to look at the last two or three jobs a contractor has done and I think this is an important consideration. If you are having trouble cutting down a CV, consider whether writing several paragraphs in the early 1990s is really relevant!
Tip #3: Concentre on your own achievements
Probably the most common criticism I hear about CV’s is that contractors do not talk specifically enough about their own achievements. Hiring managers do not want to hear about what you achieved as part of a team, they want to hear about what you delivered and what you were responsible for. This largely means that a CV should be written in the first person, the use of I is critical in demonstrating your own achievements. Many CV writing services may argue against this, but for a contractor it should be all about selling yourself. Yes, it is good to demonstrate you can work as part of a team but more importantly you are providing a short-term piece of consultancy that is often business critical.
What’s your top tip?
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