Contractor CV writing tips

How to structure your CV

In my capacity as a Career Consultant and former Recruiter, I have worked closely with the Contract / Interim community for many years and two challenges keep rearing their ugly heads: Firstly, how does a Contractor write a CV that isn’t six pages long; and secondly, what happens if you want to apply for a role that draws upon skills gained in a contract that isn’t the most recent? Recruiters tend to focus on the last job / contract (because it’s at the top) regardless of its relevance which I like to call ‘last job syndrome’. 

I anticipate lots of nodding heads at this stage and you’ll be glad to know that there is a solution! We recommend a methodology which allows Contractors to present their careers in a much more concise and effective way. Now this doesn’t work for everybody so don’t adopt this framework and start sending it off to those recruiters that run temp desks and ask silly questions about gaps between contracts. It does however work extremely well for those who understand the Contract / Interim market.  

The premise of this methodology is to move away from the traditional chronological CV and to break your career down into individual pieces of work (rather than blocks of employment). Think more about individual projects rather than periods of working for a particular company.  

You may identify 30 pieces of work that you have done throughout your career and decide that 15 of them are up to date and relevant. Once you have identified these key pieces of work, write them as short case studies (no more than 6 lines long), ideally using the STAR methodology (Situation, Task, Actions, Result). The CV then becomes a portfolio of case studies and you are able to change the order of them depending on the role that you are applying for.  

Of course, recruiters will still want to see your dates of employment, so put a career chronology section after the case studies with the date, company name and your job title.  

This framework will provide you with much more flexibility and allow you to tailor the CV to the roles you are applying for in a much more effective way. 

This style of CV is broken up into a number of sections which are as follows: 

• Professional Summary 

• Key Skills / Expertise 

• Current Role 

• Assignments (Case Study) Portfolio 

• Career Chronology 

• Certifications & Qualifications 

• Education (if not included in Qualifications) 

• Personal Details 

• Recommendations 

• Technical Appendix (if you’re a techy) 

ATS optimisation

ATS is an acronym for applicant tracking system. An ATS typically helps organisations to manage their entire recruitment / talent management process including, but not limited to job posting, CV importing, CV parsing, CV matching, candidate tracking, analytics and onboarding.

Matching & Parsing

When we talk about ATS optimisation, we are really talking about optimising CVs for the CV matching and CV parsing modules of ATS.

The CV matching module matches a contract brief with a CV and the CV parsing technology makes sense of the contents, ensuring the correct interpretation of the data prior to the CV data being imported into the ATS.

An astonishing 70% of CVs are rejected by the ATS and consequently never get read by a human.

There are several tactics that are needed to avoid this from happening, and to highlight the complexities of ATS optimisation, I have picked a scenario that many contractors will know well.

Location location

If a recruiter is looking for an IT Project Manager in Preston, its is unlikely that they will consider candidates as far away as Southampton, partly because there will be ample Project Managers in the vicinity of Preston, partly due to the operational challenges of arranging interviews for candidates in Southampton when the client is based in Preston, and partly because relocating / work away from home scenarios pose more risk that the alternatives.

Now if it was a really high-profile Programme Director role with only a hand full of suitable candidates across the UK, this rule may not apply, but mid-market and below, it’s aggravation the recruiter and employer simply does not need.

So how does this relate to ATS?

Well, what happens for many roles is that the client / recruiter stipulates that they will only consider candidates within a 30-mile radius of where the job is based.

The ATS can assess this based on postcode parameters.

So, to cut a long story short, omitting a postcode from your CV may render you one of the 70% who are rejected at source even if you live on Preston High Street.

Here at The CV & Interview Advisors we have many years’ of experience in creating highly authoritative personal branding collateral such as CVs and LinkedIn profiles for contractors, freelancers, interim managers and consultants. We are happy to announce our partnership with Outside IR35 Roles. Members of Outside IR35 Roles will now have access to exclusive discounts on our CV and LinkedIn writing services.

There are approximately 10 other important tactics that you should adopt to optimise your contract CV for ATS, why not contact us for a free CV appraisal to find out more.

If you would like a free CV appraisal and / or view the discounted services click here.