Ask HN: Has the British contract market dried up, or am I just unhireable?

I have been looking for contract work for the past two months, and I have nothing to show for it.

This is my latest resume: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/1player/resume/master/resume.pdf

I have a ton of experience, also not pictured are 1000+ hours on Upwork on random short and long term projects. I can do backend, DevOps, systems administration, bespoke development. I know C, Go, Python, Elixir, Rust and the frontend tech.

Yet I get ghosted completely by recruiters. They set up a time to call and never call. I am lowering my rate down to very low levels for someone my experience (£600/d), and no call back whatsoever. The only requirement I have is fully remote work. Still, no answer whatsoever. Not even spam from the recruiters anymore. My resume lists half of the things I have worked on, but no point in making two pages long if no one even reads the first one. Even HN direct contacts have gone nowhere.

This is majorly impacting my self-confidence, and I am at a point that I will have to drop my 11+ year consulting career for full time employment. People keep saying there are more open jobs than engineers, but I call bullshit, I cannot see it.

What is going on? Is the British job market dead? Is it Brexit? Am I in some kind of black list? Is my CV just terrible? I am at a loss here.

No one in my contact list is hiring. Just a lot of wasted time setting up calls to be told they have no spots available atm. Oh well.

I have also connected with the agency that represents you after you have mentioned it to me on a similar post ages ago, and of course they give preference to their current client list first (understandable) before looking into prospective ones like myself. I hope this is a relationship that might pay off in the long term.

But right now I literally have gone through all the contacts I have made in the past 10 years, and the only opportunity I have now is cold calling and fighting it out on Upwork, which ain't fun.

My problem is #2: I have been freelancing since 2012, and it's hard to list 20+ different projects I have worked on since, and being clear it was a contract, not full time employment. I have to choose between just underselling myself, or listing so much stuff no one will take me seriously.

Do you have an example of a good CV that clearly separates employment from freelance work? I have yet to see one.

To answer #3: I have management experience but I want a technical role, or to provide actual high-level consulting services if needed (improving processes, architecture review, etc.)

That said, thank you for the advice. My problem is that I never tried to fit into a single role, so it's hard to create a targeted CV when my foremost talent is learning on the job and wearing many hats. Recruiters tend to look for specialists on a specific piece of tech, while I have first hand knowledge that the more flexible you are, the more value you can provide your client, if you are able to get through the arbitrary restrictions the recruiter has placed on the job spec.

Not to minimize your efforts, but I get the impression you have looked for companies hiring for jobs, and sell yourself based on a list of technical skills.

I suggest focusing on business problems you can solve. A business may have a broken or slow web site, for example. They probably won't have a job opening specifically to fix that, but they still have the problem. Instead of calling around asking "Do you need another Python programmer?" ask "What problems would you like to get fixed that your staff don't have the skills or bandwidth to deal with?" No business ever had the requirement "I need 5,000 more lines of Javascript this month," so don't try to sell that to them.

Every company will hire (or contract) when someone comes along who can add value to the business.

This approach has worked for me many times. Reframing the gig-hunting process in terms of business value rather than my specific "skill set" made all the difference. Recruiters use databases full of yes-no and 0-5 rankings of keywords, they focus on moving interchangeable people around. They may also know about business problems their customers face but they make money putting bodies in chairs so don't expect too much out of them.

Think about the difference between someone knocking on your door asking if you need a person with a lawnmower for couple of hours, versus someone telling you they noticed your yard needs some care and they have the skill and tools to do it. You don't care about the brand of lawnmower they use. They identified a problem and offered a solution, one that doesn't require you make any decision beyond how much it will cost.

This is excellent advice. I must admit I have reverted to marketing myself as a code monkey lately because I haven't been able to get my foot through the door as an actual consultant selling solutions.

I have started a few long term relationships with clients by just basically asking them "what do you need fixed? Is there any way I can make your business more efficient?" but it's not the type of approach that works if your only remaining avenue is cold-calling and sending resumes.

This is certainly a fault of mine, I should have invested more in my "brand" to have the clients come to me organically (through my website or Twitter account) rather than having to knock at their door asking for a job.