The £70k Job You’re Applying for With a £35k CV

So, you’ve found a £70,000 job? Excellent. The salary is right, you like the company and you’ve read the job description three times because, for once, you can actually do most of what they’re asking for. You’ve got the management experience. You’ve worked with the right customers. You’ve delivered the projects. You’ve managed the budgets. You might even have been doing half the job already without the title or, rather annoyingly, the salary.

There’s just one small problem. Your CV still makes you look like you earn £35,000.

Don’t worry, there’s an easy way around this. Make the font smaller, add “strategic leader” to the top and perhaps throw in something about driving transformation. That should do it. After all, if you want a more senior job, the obvious solution is to use more senior-sounding words.

Or perhaps not.

I see this all the time. Someone comes to me because they want to make the next move in their career. They’re currently earning £40,000 or £45,000 and they’re looking at jobs paying £60,000 or £70,000. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Then I read their CV and it tells me they attend meetings, prepare reports, liaise with stakeholders, support projects and work effectively as part of a team.

Brilliant.

What it doesn’t tell me is that they manage 35 people, look after a £12m budget, run projects across six countries and report directly to the Managing Director.

They forgot that bit.

And this is where people get CVs completely wrong. They think a more senior CV needs to sound more senior. It doesn’t. It needs to show me that you’ve actually become more senior.

If you started with a company eight years ago on £30,000 and you’re now earning £55,000, presumably something happened in between. I’d quite like to know what it was. Did your team get bigger? Did you start managing budgets? Did you take ownership of major customers? Did you move from delivering somebody else’s projects to actually deciding what gets delivered? Did you start reporting to the Board? Did you become responsible for £10m instead of £100,000?

Because that’s the interesting stuff.

“Experienced senior leader with a proven track record of delivering strategic objectives” isn’t.

Anyone can write that.

In fact, give ChatGPT about eight seconds and it’ll happily write it for you.

The problem is that somebody earning £35,000 can put exactly the same sentence on their CV as somebody earning £100,000. It tells me absolutely nothing about either of them.

Scale does.

There’s a reason Prospects recommends using evidence rather than simply making claims about your abilities. If you tell me you’re commercially strong, I have to take your word for it. If you tell me you grew an account from £2m to £4.5m, I’ve got something rather more useful to work with.

The same applies to management.

“Managed a team.”

Excellent.

How many?

Three?

Thirty?

Three hundred?

There is quite a difference.

Yet people leave this stuff off their CVs constantly. I’ll ask someone about their current job and they’ll spend ten minutes telling me about the reports they produce, the meetings they attend and the systems they use. Then, almost as an afterthought, they’ll mention that they’re responsible for £20m.

Probably worth squeezing that in somewhere.

And job titles don’t rescue you either. A Project Manager can be running a £50,000 internal project or a £50m infrastructure programme. An Account Manager might look after twelve relatively small customers or one global account worth millions. An Operations Manager might have six people working for them or six hundred.

The title gives me a rough idea.

The CV is supposed to do the rest.

This is particularly important if you’re applying for a promotion because the employer doesn’t know all the things you know about yourself. They weren’t there when you took over the failing account. They don’t know your boss now asks you to run the department when she’s away. They haven’t seen the email from the CEO thanking you for sorting out the project everyone else had spent six months making a mess of.

They have your CV.

That’s it.

And right now there’s plenty of competition for their attention. The latest Office for National Statistics figures show UK vacancies remain considerably below their post-pandemic peak. Sending a vague CV and hoping the employer will somehow spot your potential amongst everyone else therefore seems a slightly optimistic strategy.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you can simply decide you’re worth £70,000 and rewrite your CV accordingly.

That would be nice.

I’d quite like to be Formula One World Champion. Unfortunately, several fairly important bits of evidence are missing.

Sometimes people are applying for jobs that genuinely are too senior for them. If the role wants somebody who has led 200 people across Europe and your management experience consists of supervising Dave on alternate Fridays, the CV probably isn’t the main problem.

But that isn’t what I see most often.

Usually the experience is there.

The CV just hasn’t caught up with it.

You’ve been promoted. You’ve taken on more responsibility. The budgets have grown. The customers have become bigger. The decisions have become more important. You’re dealing with people much further up the organisation than you were five years ago.

But your CV still describes the tasks.

And then you send it off for the £70,000 job and wonder why somebody already doing that job gets the interview instead.

I wrote about this from the other direction in Are You Applying for the Wrong Jobs?. Sometimes people are sending dozens of applications because they haven’t worked out what they’re actually targeting. But if you have worked that out and you genuinely have the experience, then your CV needs to make the case properly. Applying for another 50 jobs with the same document isn’t going to suddenly make the missing evidence appear.

So have another look at your CV.

If you removed your current salary and job title, what would the experience actually tell me?

Could I see the level you operate at?

Could I see the money?

The people?

The customers?

The projects?

The responsibility?

Could I see why you’re ready for the next job rather than simply what you do in this one?

Because there’s nothing wrong with applying for the £70,000 job.

Just make sure you’re not sending them the £35,000 version of you.