The contractor CV that gets replies
Last updated:
Agency screeners spend ~20 seconds on a CV. The permanent-role format (responsibilities, waffle, "team player") dies there. The contracting format is different.
Structure
- Header: role title as the agency advertises it, key skills line, day rate expectation, location + remote willingness, notice period. That's the whole first third of page one.
- Contract table: role | client | dates | one-line outcome. Screeners scan this table; make every line pay.
- Per-engagement bullets: outcome verbs — "cut batch window 4h→90m", "delivered £2m programme on budget" — not responsibilities.
- Tech/skills matrix at the end, honest levels.
Two pages, always
Longer CVs signal permanent-mode thinking. Cut ruthlessly: anything older than ~10 years compresses to one line unless it's your niche.
Then match it to the evidence: apply against listings that state their status up front — the live board shows the evidence on every row, and alerts let you reply in the first hour, where most shortlists close.
The header block, line by line
Line 1: name + advertised role title ("Senior Project Manager — transformation"). Line 2: the 6–8 keywords the agency's search runs on. Line 3: target day rate + location + remote willingness + notice. Screeners literally match line 2 against the ad — mirror its vocabulary, not your preferences.
Outcomes, quantified where honest
"Cut batch window from 4h to 90m" beats "responsible for batch processing". No invented percentages — one fabricated metric that unravels in interview poisons the real ones. Where a number is confidential, use scale ("multi-vendor £2m programme") not precision.
Tailoring without lying
Three CVs per specialism, not per application: a transformation PM version, a programme heavy version, a delivery-manager version. Reorder, don't invent. The alerts pipeline gives you the ad's exact wording — mirror it in line 2 and apply inside the first hour.
The ATS reality and the 20-second screen
Agencies run keyword matches before humans read anything: the ad's nouns must appear in your CV's nouns (skills line and recent bullets, not a keyword-stuffed footer). Then the human 20-second scan checks: right title, right rate, right location, last two engagements relevant. Everything else on the CV exists to survive those four checks — structure for the scan.
Formatting that survives agency portals
Word .docx over PDF (portals reparse and mangle PDFs), no tables/columns/headers-footers for the same reason, standard section names ("Employment history"), file named FirstnameLastname-Role.docx. Ugly-but-parseable beats beautiful-but-garbled, every time.
The engagement table: your proof of pattern
Contracting CVs live or die on the engagement table (client, dates, one-line outcome). It proves what the mortgage broker, the agency compliance team and the next client all want to see: continuous renewals. Keep dates honest to the month, client names where confidential ("global bank, retail division") acceptable, and make the most recent row the longest — recency is the screener's currency.
Get new outside-IR35 roles by email
Free vs Pro alerts — instant Telegram on Pro.
Hub: back to the hub · all guides