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The CV: making the most of your number one sales tool

Recent discussions with some of our major clients have highlighted the importance of ensuring that your skills and experience are presented so as to maximise your chances of being selected for interview.

You are almost always competing for the role, even in a buoyant market. When the economic climate is tougher and clients have more choice, the style and content of your CV can determine whether or not you have significant downtime between assignments. Think of yourself as a business, and your CV as your sales brochure – the primary communication with prospective buyers about the ‘product' you are selling: your own knowledge, experience and ability to deliver.

What does the client want to know?
That you personally can do - and have done successfully (preferably several times) - what they have now been tasked to deliver for their company. The most recent five years are most important as technology, tools and techniques before that are likely to have been superseded. Include brief information about your earlier career – knowing that you have spent fifteen or twenty years in their industry or function will give them extra comfort – but they are unlikely to hire you if the truly relevant part of your experience was a decade ago.

They will want to know that you take responsibility for delivery, whether you are a Business Analyst or a Programme Director, and will be looking for appropriate evidence. They will want to know whether you have had contracts extended or repeat assignments as these are good indications of previous success.

Now for some specifics:
Do not use the term, ‘consultant'; it implies advice, dependence on methodologies, not taking responsibility. Do not talk about yourself as ‘director' or, even worse, ‘managing director' when this is only related to your own service company – it implies that you are position conscious, hands off, exactly the opposite of what clients look for. When describing assignments, be clear about your personal responsibilities: ‘led a team of six, plus matrix management of twenty business people across four workstreams'; ‘prepared the user specification and business case'; ‘project managed the xyz workstream to design and implement the process changes'. Do not risk confusion about the level at which you operate best – you will not ultimately benefit from using ‘programme managed' when the true responsibility was project management, even of a complex, multi-stream delivery – there are many more opportunities for good senior project managers than there are for programme managers, and the rates are not that different. Make it clear where and for what you were responsible: you would be surprised how many CVs have implied personal responsibility for the entire RBS/NatWest integration when they should have said ‘project managed the implementation of the business aspects of the integration of the lending operations service centres'!

For each role, state:

Company: Barclays (not ‘leading high street bank')
Division: Retail Banking, Operations, Finance etc.
Department: Branch Network, Payments, Shared Service Centre
Duration: 12/03-08/04, initial three month assignment, extended twice
To whom you reported: Payments Director, Head of SSC, Programme Manager, Project Manager
What you did to make it happen (bullet points are ideal): the scope, team size and deliverables

Avoid terminology such as ‘advised on', ‘consulted', ‘involved in', ‘part of', ‘participated in'. The lists of experience, without responsibilities or duration or client names, that are common to consultancy CVs are just not appropriate for contract roles.

While it is helpful to have a summary of your positioning and experience at the front of the CV, keep it to one brief paragraph of relevant information that is not repeated later in the CV and accurately reflects the level at which you can (and want to) operate. Some indication of personal style may be included but needs to be easily interpreted. We have seen CVs with two pages of general description – no client will wade through this and will probably assume that this inability to be succinct is the most prominent characteristic of the candidate!

Your CV should not exceed three pages. You can provide more detail relevant to the assignment at the interview. Remember to include any appropriate qualifications – Prince certification, your degree, personal development achievements such as NLP languages. The client is unlikely to want to know you got six ‘O' levels in 1960 or belong to the Institute of Directors. Neither will they be interested in your hobbies or your family.

Finally, be very careful about acronyms, jargon, spelling and grammar. Remember the product brochure analogy – errors in the literature imply failings in the product, and that's the last thing you want.

A well-presented CV is your number one sales tool. Take the time and make the effort to get it right.

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