How to go from Self Employed back into Full Time Employment

To set up your own business and become successfully self employed is the dream of many, but really difficult to pull off.

But what happens when you’re already self employed but want to get back into full time employment working for someone else? Running your own business requires you to wear many hats, CEO, Director, Head of Finance, Manager, Customer Service, and countless other responsibilities, but how do you represent this on a CV? One of our clients was in this specific situation. Whilst their interview skills were great and their verbal ability to sell themselves were beyond doubt, their lackluster and confused CV meant that they were struggling getting these interviews. 

How to help? 

Well the first question we asked was simple. What do you want your CV to do? What jobs are you specifically applying for and can we focus on those roles? Whilst it is often true with CVs that the more detail the better, you don’t want to confuse your message. If you’re looking for management, then you need to highlight your experience in management, everything else can just confuse a prospective hiring manager. 

Once we were able to identify the client’s specific needs, we were then able to tailor their wealth of experience into a concise yet detailed CV that had clear messages for each role the client was applying for. 

Don’t get the wrong idea! We didn’t chop and change their experience and get rid of important milestones in the business they had been running, this information is really great on a CV. But we really needed to utilise the right language and format the experience so that any reader will know clearly what experience is relevant to the role in question. 

After working over the course of several meetings and revisions we were able to produce the perfect product for this client’s needs. To no-one at Kenny Refresh’s surprise this client used their new CV to secure several desired interviews, and as we predicted they knocked the interviews out of the park. Moral of the story? Varied experience is brilliant, but make sure to understand what roles you’re applying for and how to edit accordingly.

If you need help doing this, get in touch!