Your Perfect CV - Contractor

The objective of your CV is to secure the interview that wins your next contract; and therefore all of your experience relevant to each specific opportunity must be clearly visible. Ensure that you review the job description, and enhance your CV to make your most pertinent skills and experience clear before submitting your application.

The following tips provide a guideline to building your perfect CV

• Length – Try to keep your CV to a maximum of 5 pages, make your communication concise and remember to describe positive outcomes of any assignments or projects you were involved in.
• Gaps – Please ensure that no gaps are left on your C.V. in terms of your employment record. If you have had a period of unemployment, taken time out or had an extended holiday etc. please list them.
• Qualifications – Ensure that you list your qualifications, most recent first, working backwards; display results and grades where possible.
• Personal Profile – create an opening paragraph which describes your personal objectives and work style.
• Skills Summary – Include a skills summary if you have extensive technical skills. You could also describe your level of expertise in each skill.
• Order – Ensure that your employment history starts with your most recent employer and work backwards in time from there. Each position will require a job title, description of your duties, skills acquired and used for that work period and any achievements or awards.
• Presentation – Finally always check your CV once completed. Remember if you are submitting your CV on line, spelling and grammar mistakes will be highlighted to the reader.
• References – Do not provide contact names, simply state that references are available upon request from the following employers.
• Personal Interests – Only list personal interests in they're relevant to the job you are applying for.
• Formatting – If your CV is being e-mailed, send it to yourself and print it off before submission to a potential employer. Don't include anything in your CV which may mean it is forwarded to the Junk E-mail Folder.
• Do a Spell Check & ask someone to check it for grammatical errors.

Submitting your CV to agencies

Consider how agencies search their databases when they have a vacancy. To ensure that you are highlighted in their database search and contacted about relevant roles you must include key words (and their synonyms) in your CV. If you are registering with a specialist agency it may be worth asking a consultant to review your CV for relevant key words, in order that you are short-listed.