IT Contractor CV Tips

Blake Thompson, our Senior Contract Recruitment Consultant has a selection of  IT Contractor CV Tips for IT contractors to consider when writing the best CV to get them their next role.

 Blake Thompson, Senior Technology Recruiter

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To ensure that your CV stands out in what is a sea of talent, we recommend the following:

TIP 1 – Technical Stack

All too often at the top of CV’s which we receive we’ll see a splurge of every technical skill and capability that someone has considered working with and that can actually include personal projects, however this isn’t the way to lay it out.

We actually recommend a two-pronged approach. Firstly, at the top have your technical skills but keep it restricted to just your commercial knowledge as well as how much experience you actually have with those skills

So, for example if you’ve spent 5 years working with ASP.NET put that in there, then for the second prong, under the description of each of your projects put what technical stack you were working with. In this include languages, frameworks, what you’re using for CI/CD, serverless or on-premises architecture, project management processes, what you use for testing, etc.

TIP 2 – Project Description

The next thing to consider is the actual project descriptions themselves. A lot of the time what we’ll see is what essentially looks like a job description ripped straight from the client’s website. However only a couple of lines at the top are needed for this as what they really want to see is exactly what you were doing and what the outcomes were.

So, think in terms of achievements rather than duties. An example of this is if you were creating commercial software for a client, rather than simply putting ‘created commercial software,’ you could put ‘created commercial software for a client that was completed 2 months early with a total saving of £50K.’

TIP 3 – Project Renewals

In the part of the CV after the job description where you put the date, put in the brackets how many times you were renewed. For new clients it is a good indication that you are in a position to remain in the role for longer if needed because of extra work load and also that previous clients were happy to keep you on longer beyond the initial projects.

TIP 4 – Don’t worry about writing in 1^st or 3^rd person, just drop the pronouns

There seems to be a lot of back and forth on whether it’s better to write a CV in 1^st or 3^rd person. Our recommendation would be, rather than having to worry about which is best (neither is the answer) just drop the pronoun altogether.

So, for example, rather than writing “I setup the CI/CD pipelines for the project” simply put “Setup the CI/CD pipelines for the project”.

We hope that these tips will be use to you and make sure to read more from Blake on his insights to the IT contractor market.

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