Careers
Most people who join are placed onto a client programme rather than into a head office team, and that shapes what the job is actually like. You work inside an operation that is not ours, to their dates, with your employment and the administration behind it held here. It suits people who would rather move between hard problems every couple of years than stay with one system for a decade, and who are comfortable being the person brought in precisely because something is not working yet.
Current openings
Nothing is open at the moment
That is the state of the board today rather than a page nobody has updated. Roles here tend to open at short notice, usually when a programme moves from award into mobilisation and a team has to exist within weeks. By that point the shortlist is often drawn from people already known to us, which is the argument for writing before there is anything to apply for.
Send a CVWhat the work asks of you
Four things come up in almost every conversation, and they are worth knowing before you spend an evening on an application. None of them is unusual in this industry. All of them are easier to hear now than at the point an offer is being discussed.
Willingness to go where the work is
Programmes happen in particular places, and the interesting phases are usually the ones that need people physically present. Some roles are fully remote, many are not, and a few are rotational. Being clear from the first conversation about what you can and cannot do saves everybody a round: a constraint stated early is a filter, and a constraint discovered late is a withdrawn offer.
Comfort inside another organisation
On a deployment you sit inside a client team, follow their process, and are often the only person there with your specialism. That means reading a room you did not grow up in, and asking for what you need without the standing that comes from being on their payroll. People who enjoy this describe it as variety. People who do not tend to want a permanent seat somewhere, which is a reasonable thing to want and worth knowing about yourself.
Certificates that have not quietly expired
Qualifications, safety tickets and clearances all carry dates, and a lapsed one stops a mobilisation dead however good the fit is. Keep them current, and keep the evidence somewhere you can produce it in a day rather than a fortnight. If something is mid renewal, say so and say when it completes. It is a scheduling fact, not a mark against you.
Depth you can be questioned on
Technical conversations here are run by a practitioner rather than a recruiter, and they drop one layer below your CV almost immediately. A list of technologies invites the question of which one you would defend. That is a good outcome if you have genuinely owned something, and an uncomfortable one if the list came from a project you were merely adjacent to.
How hiring runs
Five stages. Setting them out matters because the alternative, from where you are standing, is weeks of silence that could mean anything. Each stage says what it is for and roughly how long it takes. Where a client runs their own process alongside this one, you are told at the point it starts rather than left to infer it.
Someone reads it
A person, within about a week. You get an answer either way, including when the answer is that there is nothing suitable, because the alternative is you refreshing an inbox for a month. If nothing fits today the CV is kept and read again when a mandate opens in your discipline, which is a real event here rather than a polite formula.
A conversation about what you have done
Half an hour or so, and deliberately not a competency interview. The aim is to establish what you actually owned, what you would want next, and what would make you turn something down. Naming a constraint here costs nothing. Discovering it at offer stage costs everybody several weeks and usually ends the same way.
The technical stage
Longer, and with a practitioner in the room. Expect to go a layer below the summary on your CV and to be asked why you made a particular decision rather than what the decision was. Where a role is not technical, this stage becomes a situational one instead and works the same way: specifics, not duties.
Meeting the client
For a deployment there is a further stage with the organisation you would work in, and their process is theirs. What happens here is that you are briefed properly first: who you are meeting, what the programme is under pressure from, and what they are likely to probe. Turning up cold to that stage is avoidable and there is no reason for it.
Offer, notice and getting started
An offer covers the rate or salary, the length if it is a defined phase, and what happens at the end of it, including whether redeployment is likely. Then paperwork, right to work checks and whatever the site needs. Notice periods are where agreed hires most often fall over, so you stay in contact through yours rather than hearing nothing until the first day.
What to put in a CV
A CV is read here for depth rather than coverage. Naming twelve technologies tells us less than one paragraph on a system you owned: what it ran on, how large it really was, and what broke. Write what you did rather than what the team delivered, because the first technical call goes straight there, and a vague claim is worse than a modest one that holds up. Keep the dates continuous and account for the gaps. A gap that is explained is not interesting to anybody, and an unexplained one has to be asked about before any of the useful conversation can start.
Send a CV