Contractors who have a targeted, high impact CV have a much greater chance of securing a steady stream of lucrative contracts. With only a ten-second window to catch a recruitment agent's or client's eye, your CV must say exactly what they want to hear.
Failure to prepare a CV that contains just the right amount of information, displayed in an accessible manner and in an industry recognised format will get your CV quickly filed, but in the bin.
Fortunately, there is a semi-standard format for contractors' CVs, so it's easy to prepare a 'standard' CV that an agent or client will put onto their 'possible interview' pile. The key sections include:
- Your profile, which should be a four-line summary
- Your skills and expertise, with about ten bullets points proving you are qualified for the contract
- Your achievements, which are measurable benefits you provided to other clients
- Previous clients, to show what you've done successfully for others, using your relevant skills.
And remember that you are preparing a targeted CV for a specific contract, so you must include only skills, expertise, achievements and past contracts that are relevant to the contract you are applying for.
Include basic details of your academic achievements and professional qualifications, but keep them to one line. And remember that what you studied becomes increasingly irrelevant as you gain on-the-job experience and additional skills.
Hobbies can be ice-breakers, as shared interests may lead to the client developing an affinity with you that could help you win you the contract if you are head to head with another contractor with the same skills.
Applying for a contract is not the same as applying for a full-time permanent job. A client might forgive gaps in skills and experience in a candidate for a permanent role because they can be trained-up. But contractors must have exactly the skills and experience that the client needs now to hit the ground running.
You have to sell a product that is YOU, and your targeted, high impact CV is just like a sales brochure to use with your customers - agents and clients. As with any sales brochure, you need just the right amount of features and benefits to make it to the next stage of the sales cycle, which is the interview.
Investing time in creating a high impact, targeted CV is well worth the effort, as the returns you will see are the interviews you attend and the contracts you win as a result.
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Dave Chaplin was an IT contractor in the City and knows what it takes to carve out a successful contracting career. He has turned all his experiences and those of dozens of contractor experts into a fantastic resource of how-to guides, advice and detailed contractor information, which you can download for free from www.contractorcalculator.co.uk.
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