The Bench / Playbook 001
Why your contract CV gets no callbacks
Your CV can be accurate and still leave a recruiter guessing.
"Gathered requirements." "Managed stakeholders." "Delivered the project." These describe the work, but leave important questions unanswered: what was the problem, what did you own, and what changed?
I use the five questions below when reviewing and rewriting contract CVs. Start with one recent engagement and work through them.
The five questions
| Question | What the reader needs to understand |
|---|---|
| Why did the work exist? | The problem, deadline or change behind the project |
| What were you brought in to do? | Your responsibility and its boundaries |
| What did you actually do? | Your actions and deliverables |
| Who did you have to move? | The people involved, the constraints and your approach |
| What did it leave behind? | The result and what remained after you left |
Why I ask these questions
When I put someone forward, I need to explain what they owned and why it fits the brief. "Involved in" leaves me asking whether they led the work, supported it or attended the meetings. Specific deliverables, decisions and outcomes give me something useful to discuss with the hiring manager.
Start with one engagement
Open your CV beside this guide. Choose a recent role relevant to the work you want next.
Write plain answers to the questions before trying to make them sound like CV copy. Then use those answers to build:
- A short context line explaining the engagement and your responsibility.
- Bullets showing specific actions, deliverables and outcomes.
You don't need all five answers in every bullet. The engagement as a whole should make them clear.
The examples below are composites, with details changed. Their figures are illustrative. Use your own evidence and figures you can explain – never borrow the numbers.
1. Why did the work exist?
Someone approved a budget and brought people in. What needed to change?
It might have been an audit finding, a regulatory deadline, a merger, an ageing platform or a service that wasn't working. Naming that reason helps the reader understand the work.
Business Analyst
Responsible for requirements gathering, workshop facilitation and process mapping.
Prepared BRDs, user stories and functional documentation.
Liaised with business units and technical teams.
Led requirements for a payroll remediation program at a national retailer after an underpayment review – mapped 14 award interpretations against the time-and-attendance build and wrote the configuration rules the vendor delivered against.
The reader can now see why the program existed, the subject matter and what the BA produced. "Requirements gathering" becomes specific work with a clear purpose.
For one engagement, finish these sentences:
- The organisation needed to…
- The work became necessary because…
- My part was…
Keep the explanation brief. Give enough context to understand your contribution without writing the project's entire history.
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2. What were you brought in to do?
A program's size tells the reader about the environment. It doesn't explain your responsibility within it.
Separate what the whole team delivered from what you owned.
Part of the project team for a $30m billing transformation delivered on time and on budget.
Brought in at the build phase of a $30m billing platform replacement at an energy retailer to stand up and lead the data migration stream – eight people across two vendors.
Owned the cutover plan and produced the go/no-go evidence for three trial cutovers; go/no-go authority sat with the program director.
The context line establishes the phase, team and responsibility. The bullet shows evidence of that responsibility.
The decision boundary matters too. Producing the evidence for a decision is different from having authority to make it. Stating that accurately makes the claim easier to trust.
Write down:
- What you were engaged to deliver or take responsibility for.
- Which stream, team, system or capability you owned.
- Where your authority stopped.
Use the program budget when it helps explain scale, but don't leave it doing all the work. "Part of the team" still needs an explanation.
3. What did you actually do?
"Involved in" can mean leading the work, supporting it or attending the meetings. Give the reader enough detail to understand your contribution.
Use an action and its object: planned the migration, wrote the configuration rules, built the forecast, ran the evaluation.
Involved in the migration of on-premises workloads to Azure across multiple workstreams.
Planned and ran the migration of 140 workloads to Azure over nine months at a retail group – sequenced waves around trading freezes, wrote the rollback standard after wave one failed verification, and closed the remaining waves inside their outage windows.
The rewrite identifies the work, its scale, an operating constraint and the response to a problem.
The failed verification belongs here because it explains a useful action. You don't need to catalogue every setback. Include the ones that help demonstrate your judgment and contribution.
Use language the next employer recognises
Internal project names and acronyms can hide relevant experience. If your organisation called something "the TOM uplift", explain the actual work – such as target operating model redesign.
Use the terminology in relevant role descriptions where it accurately describes your experience. Don't add keywords for work you haven't done.
Find a vague phrase in your CV and ask:
- Planned what?
- Built what?
- Changed what?
- Decided what?
Write the answer.
4. Who did you have to move?
"Excellent stakeholder engagement" is a claim. Show the situation and what you did.
Who needed to agree, change a process or adopt something new? What made that difficult? How did you address it?
Excellent stakeholder engagement and communication skills across all levels of the business.
Brought four infrastructure teams onto one asset register after years of parallel lists – rebuilt the longest-standing standalone register, held in the team's deployment tool, into the central model first and automated their reporting from it. Four registers became one within a quarter.
The example shows the teams, the practical obstacle and the solution.
The existing register was part of a team's working tools. Moving its information and automating reporting explains how the change became workable.
Describe the constraint without blaming the people. "The team relied on a separate register for deployment reporting" explains more than "the team resisted change".
Write down:
- Who needed to change how they worked.
- What they needed to protect or keep working.
- What you changed to make agreement or adoption possible.
- What happened as a result.
5. What did it leave behind?
Show the result, then explain what was handed over or continued after your contract ended.
That might be a working service, an agreed process, a trained team, a reporting routine or a decision the business could act on.
Successfully delivered cloud cost optimisation initiatives resulting in significant savings.
Cut a university's cloud spend 22% in six months, then put ongoing controls in place: tagging enforced in the pipeline, a monthly cost review the platform owners now chair, and a forecast model finance runs without me.
The result is specific. The reader can also see how the organisation took ownership of the work.
Use a number when you can support it. If you cannot verify a saving or percentage, describe the observable result: a service handed over, a process adopted, a decision approved or a team able to operate independently.
Be careful with continuing claims. Write "finance now runs the model" only if you know that remains true. Otherwise, describe the position at handover.
Answer:
- What changed by the end of the engagement?
- What did you hand over?
- Who took responsibility for it?
- What evidence supports the result?
Make it easy to understand and repeat
I read a CV against a brief, then need to explain why the person fits. "Built the cutover plan" gives me more to pass on than "excellent organisational skills".
Your CV may also be found later through an agency database or LinkedIn search. Recognisable role names, systems and deliverables help a reader connect your experience to the work in front of them. Keep the context current so an old tool or project doesn't give the wrong impression of your focus.
Once you've rewritten an engagement, ask someone unfamiliar with it to read it.
Can they explain, in one sentence, what you were brought in to do and what you delivered?
If they can only repeat your job title, add the missing detail. If the sentence takes a paragraph to explain, simplify it.
Check the finished engagement
Before moving to the next role, check that:
- The reason is clear: the reader knows why the work existed.
- Your responsibility is clear: your contribution is distinguishable from the wider program.
- The actions are specific: the reader can see what you built, changed, produced or decided.
- The people and constraints are clear: stakeholder claims have an example behind them.
- The result is supported: outcomes and figures are accurate, including claims about what continued after you left.
- The story is easy to repeat: someone outside the project can explain your contribution.
Then work through the next relevant engagement.
What this can – and can't – fix
These questions help you present your experience clearly. They cannot create missing experience or guarantee a callback.
If applications still go quiet, review the roles you're targeting, the requirements you meet and the way you're applying. Your CV may still need work, but it is only one part of the decision.
For a specific vacancy, continue with Playbook 002: Tailoring your contract CV to a live role.
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