Should a day rate go on the CV

There is no field for it in this product and no convention page on this site recommending one. A rate is a negotiation, and a document that opens it before the conversation has started has given something away for nothing.

How do I stop six short roles reading as instability

Say the word contract on the role line, with the client named beside it. A reader who knows the engagement was six months by design stops counting.

Does the checker penalise short roles

No. It has no rule about the length of a role. It grades parseability, the seven completeness essentials and four content rules, and none of them looks at duration.

Where do umbrella companies and agencies go

Wherever the truth is clearest. If the agency is the employer of record, name the client in the line beneath rather than in the role title.

Can I keep different versions for different sectors

Yes. Versions are kept in the builder when you ask for one, and exporting gives you a file. Everything stays in this browser.

Blog · Audiences

A contractor's CV is a list of engagements, and the page has to say so on line one

A contractor's page is read by somebody scanning for stability they were never going to find. The fix is to declare the shape early rather than let it be discovered.

ConxfolioPublished 2026-09-12

— say contract on the line. the dates stop being a question.

The résumé editor with the document rendering beside the sections being edited — The editor. Each engagement is an entry; the lines under it are where the client goes.

A contractor's CV fails in the first four seconds. Six roles, none longer than a year, no explanation of why, and a reader who has already decided what that means. The facts are ordinary and the presentation is doing the damage. The résumé builder gives you the structure; declaring the shape is a writing decision and it takes one word.

Declare the engagement on the role line

Backend Engineer (contract) — Northwind Pay — March 2024 to November 2024. That parenthesis changes what the dates mean. Without it the reader is counting departures; with it they are reading a list of engagements that ended when they were supposed to. Do it on every contract entry, including the short ones, and especially the short ones.

The practice option

Where the engagements are short and numerous, the alternative is one entry for your own practice with the clients named in the achievement lines under it. That keeps the dates continuous and gives the checker's evidence-depth rule more lines to count, which is worked through in freelancers and continuity. Neither shape is the correct one; they suit different ratios of client count to engagement length.

The day rate question

There is no rate field in this product, and there is no page on this site that recommends putting one on a CV. The reason is not delicacy. A rate on the document is a number in the room before anybody has described the work, and it is read as a ceiling rather than a floor. The United Kingdom's nidirect government service lists salary among the things a CV does not need (nidirect.gov.uk). Where an agency asks for a rate, that is an email, not a document.

Dates, consistently

Contractor pages carry more dates than anyone else's, which makes them the pages most exposed to the parseability rule. It deducts for a mixed date format and for shortened years. Pick one shape and use it on every entry including education. Date formats on a résumé and multiple roles at one company cover the neighbouring cases.

What the checker does and does not look at

The résumé editor with the document rendering beside the sections — The editor. The render on the right is the document itself, not a preview of it.

No rule about the length of a role. No rule about the number of employers. The ATS résumé checker grades whether the text comes out in order, whether the seven essentials are present with real content, and whether the achievement lines carry action, figures and depth. A contractor page with eight engagements and one line each will lose points on depth, not on churn. The arithmetic is printed on every report.

The file the agency wants

Agencies rebrand CVs. That means a DOCX, and it is free here with no watermark, built in this browser without a network call at all. The PDF is the version you send directly. Both are in the download menu in the editor, and the measurement of what each export costs the network is in your DOCX is built in your browser.

The letter, per engagement

Contract applications move fast and the letter gets skipped. Where one is asked for, the cover letter builder selects its proof paragraphs from your own résumé lines and lists what the posting asks for and your evidence cannot support, rather than claiming it. One letter per posting is the model the product assumes, and it says so on the details step.

What is not claimed here

Nothing on this site predicts whether a contract CV wins work, and the checker says plainly that it is not a hiring prediction. What is measurable is on the report: the counts it read and the sum it used. Everything in the product is free with no account, and the work stays in this browser until you export it.

A note on the summary, which does more work on a contract page than on a permanent one. An agency reads it to decide which shortlist you belong on, and a client reads it to decide whether you have done this before. Two sentences carrying the specialism, the years and the size of the environments you work in will do it. The checker has a completeness check for a summary worth ten of that dimension's hundred points, measured in summary or no summary.

The last thing worth saying is about currency. A contract page goes stale faster than any other kind, because the engagement that ended last month is the one that matters. Update it the week an engagement finishes rather than the week you start looking, while the numbers are still in front of you and the achievement lines can be written from a handover rather than from memory.

Write the engagements down

Import what you have and give every engagement a role, dates and a line about what changed. Free, in this browser.

Open the résumé builder Read the freelance work guide

Questions

Should a day rate go on the CV: There is no field for it in this product and no convention page on this site recommending one. A rate is a negotiation, and a document that opens it before the conversation has started has given something away for nothing.
How do I stop six short roles reading as instability: Say the word contract on the role line, with the client named beside it. A reader who knows the engagement was six months by design stops counting.
Does the checker penalise short roles: No. It has no rule about the length of a role. It grades parseability, the seven completeness essentials and four content rules, and none of them looks at duration.
Where do umbrella companies and agencies go: Wherever the truth is clearest. If the agency is the employer of record, name the client in the line beneath rather than in the role title.
Can I keep different versions for different sectors: Yes. Versions are kept in the builder when you ask for one, and exporting gives you a file. Everything stays in this browser.

Conxfolio is a free set of four career tools: a résumé builder with 37 rendered layouts, an ATS résumé checker that prints its own arithmetic, a cover letter builder that traces every proof paragraph back to the line it came from, and a portfolio builder with 20 authored designs. There is no account to create, nothing is held back for a paid plan, and no language model is used anywhere in the product, so the readers, the score and the letter are deterministic code you can check.