Your CV

Instead of giving you a lesson on how resumés are different from CV’s, or how to write one from scratch, I’ll just tell you what changes I made to my resumé to make it more appealing to UK employers:

1. Add your personal details, including birthdate, nationality, gender, and marital status. Did your jaw just drop? Ok, I don’t add this information to my CV because I simply cannot bring myself to do it, although an English friend of mine has this information right at the top of his. So it’s what a lot of people do here but you can decide how important it would be for you.
2. Include a “Profile” at the top. Again, something US resumé experts often advise against but all of my English colleagues have this on their CVs. It usually says something to the effect of “Target-orientated, proactive and honest retail professional with experience in a busy buying department and e-commerce business unit. Seeks new opportunities to increase revenue and margin, whilst effectively managing existing range.“ Sigh. Yep, something like that should go on there. I try to keep mine as short and simple as possible using words that are backed-up by my work experience descriptions (that isn’t my profile above, fyi).
3. Follow with job history that also include a short descriptor of who your US employers are. UK employers often have never heard of the “major US company” you worked for. I’ve included short descriptions next to my previous employers (i.e. “Bumblebee Publishing – a mid-sized US publisher specialising in art and cookery books”) and also included small url for the company. In two interviews I’ve been told they looked up online the companies listed on my CV.
4. Include skills, hobbies and interests. I never included hobbies or interests on my US resumé but it’s the norm here. I go all out in this area, though I am careful of saying I like “travel”. Since you have the foreign aspect potentially working against you, what you say here may imply something about how available/reliable you are. An interviewer actually called me out on the “travel” thing by casually saying, “I see here you like travel. Do you go away often?” I don’t recall what I said, probably something about once a month or something but I didn’t get that job. Put two and two together. Who knows, but it’s better safe than sorry.

Interviewing

I’ve lost count of the number of interviews I’ve been on here. I’ve been on many first, second and third interviews. All of my interviewers have been English and one was American (the travel one, above, who didn’t hire me). Interviews here are more or less the same as they are back home (some interviewers like to ask standard, rigid lines of questioning while others like a causal, conversational approach) and you go into interviews more or less the same way you already know how to. A few things though to keep in mind:

• What to Wear. Same concept here as the US: how to dress for an interview is all dependent on how casual or formal the company is, which you will know better than I will. I’ve worked for digital/web/new media companies, relatively young, so for interviews I go in what they call “smart casual” (business casual). After the first interview, after seeing the office or how my interviewer is dressed, I will either relax and get a little more creative, or wear essentially the same thing. Once, during a phone call when I was setting up to interview for job #2, the employer was nice enough to mention that the office was really casual and there was “no need to come in dressed overly smart”. I took that to mean definitely no suit/blazer, probably everyone was in jeans and t-shirts so I think I wore black trousers and a v-neck sweater.

• How to Speak. This may not apply to you but I feel I should mention it. Americans tend to link their words together, speak somewhat quickly and pronounce their “T”s as if they were “D”s. English people enunciate each syllable, speak truly clearly and deliberately and, well, pronounce things correctly. It behooves you in an interview to not use slang, not say “You know?”, to speak clearly and to read the person’s face to see if you’re being understood. Thankfully, or not, with the omnipresence of American films and TV in the UK, your accent shouldn’t be difficult to understand. But there have several instances where I’m having a conversation with someone and all I get is a blank stare. I’ve started learning to repress my California speech intonations and pronounce my T’s, and speak more slowly, especially in business environments where I’ve been the only American most people have ever worked with. Don’t try to fake an English accent, either. That would just be embarrassing. Also, try to avoid saying things like “Cover all of my bases” or “I hit a grand slam with that one!” or any other American-sports reference that makes its way into how we speak. Don’t assume anyone besides Americans get these. They don’t play baseball here.
• What to Say. This is the same as in the US. You are in an interview to sell them on your experience, qualifications and give them reasons why they should hire you. The difference here is you may have to do some extra explaining. If I tell them I worked for Ann Taylor (which I didn’t, it’s just an example) and helped develop their online business, etc, it won’t mean anything to them if they’ve never heard of Ann Taylor. What I need to tell them is that I worked for Ann Taylor, which is similar in size, revenue and clientèle to LK Bennett, a UK company. It has retail stores in every state, their average customer is however many years old, and setting up their online business was a $1 billion venture. That brand name familiarity you would get in the US doesn’t exist here, and even if there are US brands or companies here, they aren’t usually national or across the UK.
• Do not give the impression you will only be in the country for a limited time. Unless you’re going for a short-term contract, would you hire someone if you knew they were only going to be in the country for six months, or if they seemed unsure about how long they would be around? If asked in an interview, say you have long term plans to the stay in the UK or plan to be here indefinitely. When I first moved here, I thought we were only staying nine months my first job was a six month contract position so I didn’t feel guilty about potentially leaving soon. My employer also didn’t have a problem with it. For my second and third job however (full-time positions, not contracts), I told interviewers I was planning to live in the UK for at least the next four or five years. When I tell them my spouse works here as well and now works for the London office of his employer, it shows we are solidly living here, instead of just passing through.
• But don’t worry about being a foreigner. Don’t worry about whether they will hire you or not based on your foreign status. As long as you have a visa to work here, they can hire you problem free. They will only make a photocopy of your visa and keep it in their records if there is ever a question. It’s only if you don’t have a work permit and they need to sponsor you to get you that visa that they have to “prove they couldn’t hire a UK citizen to do the job” which, to be honest, just seems like fine print companies ignore. I worked with a woman who was working on a temporary work permit and when it was near expiring, our company sponsored her to stay. I have no idea if they actually checked to see if there was anyone else who could do the job that didn’t need sponsorship but they clearly didn’t want her to go anywhere so they made it happen. It happens all the time, in fact. Plenty of people are here on temporary visas and get sponsored by their company to stay longer. When people mention how difficult it is to find a job because companies need to prove they couldn’t find a UK citizen capable of filling the job, I doubt they’ve actually witnessed someone being refused for that reason.

Read more about what to expect on the job