Essential Tips for your IT Contractor CV

The perfect CV will give a huge boost to your chances of being shortlisted and getting the job. However, writing the perfect CV that stands out from the crowd can be extremely difficult.
To make things even more difficult, when applying for contract roles your CV will differ to that of a permanent position. In this blog post, we explain a few essential tips you need to think about on your IT Contractor CV so that you impress the hiring manager and land your next IT jobs.
 
Explain Your Skills
The company you’re sending your CV to wants to know your specific skill set. If they don’t know this, how can they decide if you’re suitable for the role? You must keep your CV up to date with your latest skills, as the IT industry is constantly changing with new technologies. You need to show the company that you’re skills are up to date with the current demands.
Therefore, you must include your technical skills in your CV, if you’re knowledgable in LAN and WAN networks, tell them!
 
Choose your most relevant experience
Unfortunately, you cannot just include every bit of experience that you have. CV’s should aim to be precise and relevant to the job description. Therefore, you should be selective in what you include in your CV. We recommend a maximum of two a4 pages for your CV, as hiring managers are busy people and they don’t have time to read through pages and pages of your CV.
As a contractor, it is likely that you will have a lot of different experience throughout your career. So you need to choose your most relevant experience to the role that you’re applying for. There is no need for you to list every contract role you have had.
It’s about finding the right balance of including enough detail about yourself, without overwhelming the hiring manager with huge amounts of irrelevant information. So you should include more information on your latest and more relevant roles, whereas you just need to include a brief summary on older and less relevant roles.
 
Include your renewals
A great tip that will impress hiring managers, is to include how many times your contract has been renewed. This shows that the company or client valued your skills and wanted to keep you on their team. Include this information in the experience section of your CV, for example;
Dynamic Search Solutions – 18 months – 3 renewals
Then just include the summary of your work underneath as normal.
 
Check for errors
Any errors on your CV can look unprofessional. It suggests that you didn’t bother to read through your CV and don’t pay attention to detail, even though that is not the case. If a hiring manager is working through a ton of CV’s for a role, and he see’s spelling mistakes it may lead to him throwing the CV in the ‘no pile’.
You must proofread very carefully, a quick scan through it won’t be good enough. If you...