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Register as a LocumPreparing a CV for Locum Work – Top Tips from Jonathan Fagan, Director of Interim Lawyers Locum Legal Recruitment, specialists for locum jobs across the UK.
Prepare a Locum CV for Locum Work
Writing a CV for locum work is a bit different to preparing a CV for permanent roles. You need to give the following information immediately to any reader:
- Confirmation you have experience as a locum
- Detailed information about your experience – if you are a conveyancing solicitor, what exactly are you able to do?
- Full information on your professional career since qualification
- No gaps on the CV
- Confirmation you have a clean practising certificate and impeccable career to date
- IT experience
- Your address
Write a Relevant Summary
Very easy to do. At the top of the CV, below your name and contact details, including a 2 sentence summary as to who you are and what you do. For example “Residential Conveyancing Solicitor with 25 years PQE, based near Lowestoft but available for assignments everywhere. Conveyancing experience to date includes (detail here). IT literate and able to use (list CMS here). Hourly rate £40 per hour.”
Keep the Education Section Brief
The education section needs to be brief if you are looking at locum work and not detract from focus on the work experience section. The first entry needs to be the fact that you are a solicitor or legal executive and the date you were admitted to the roll or gained your legal executive certificate. Underneath this you need to include your university degree, SQE/LPC/GDL. The class of your undergraduate degree can be very useful particularly if it is a 2:1 or 1st Class. Confirmation of A Level grades can also be good if you have straight As or Bs, but GCSEs or O Levels simply need to be stated and the number. Make sure this section is in reverse chronological order.
Full Work History
- Your work history needs to be in full from the moment you left school through to the present day.
- Keep irrelevant or dated entries brief.
- Write an extensive list of bullet points broken down into different sections covering all the different work that you have undertaken and are capable of assisting with, and then underneath this give a reverse chronological list of all the assignments you have undertaken.
- 2-3 pages of detail on your work history would not be unusual.
IT Skills
Very important but keep it brief. So many locum assignments now require locums to be able to handle their own IT & admin work, and a CV that does not contain confirmation of this is going to be ineffective. Firms want to see that you are IT literate. Typing speed and confirmation of experience of different CMS is very, very important for certain types of law. List the CMS you can use.
References
Don’t worry about references unless you have two “to whom it may concern” references you can send out in full with the CV. Failing this, we would recommend having ‘available on request’ but making sure you have two references you can use when asked.
General Pointers
- There is no such thing as a perfect length of a CV but we usually recommend making sure your CV is at least 3 pages long, if not longer, in order to get the information into it that we would like to see.
- Make sure you use a nice simple font and avoid using Microsoft templates, boxes, text fields, ensuring that the CV is as text based as possible without too much embellishment.
- Always send the CV as a word document and not a PDF. PDFs cause terrible problems despite looking more professional than a word document. They are considerably harder to manipulate and use across differing systems. This has not changed in 25 years of recruitment.
