Because we have gone from a feast to a famine. I took some time off my normal job/contracting roles in 2022 to create and launch an app idea I had. Then, I onl

Because we have gone from a feast to a famine. I took some time off my normal job/contracting roles in 2022 to create and launch an app idea I had. Then, I only started looking again last year (UK) and it was tumbleweed. I only got a decent contract this December. I also had a brief snazzy 1 page CV and a long 3 page buzzword CV, as PDFs only. But when I did a CV workshop with a recruiter he gave me several good advice. First, recruiters hate PDFs, especially contract ones that need to add their template headers to etc. If yours is too much effort, they will just discard it. So I have both PDF and Word versions available. Second the top half of the first page is what matters. They will glance to see if you are relevant. So highlight what you can do. But do not give them a wall of text. Thirdly they only really care what you have done in the last couple of years. I used to detail great roles I had a decade ago. It is in fact for the recruiter nearly irrelevant. So I made the older ones very terse and expanded the recent ones. But not too much. I still have my 1 pager https://eray.uk/cv/ivar/short/ https://eray.uk/cv/ivar/short/ but recruiters now get a new 2 page CV and mostly as a word doc. In a famine, they may get 20 or even 50 CVs/resumes per role. They will only glance at a fraction of those. Make yours stand out. But most importantly call them repeatedly to remind them who you are so that yours get added to the relevant pile.