Here’s the thing about CVs: the same experience can land brilliantly with one hiring manager and fall completely flat with another, especially when you’re moving between agency, in-house and public sector roles. Each type of organisation looks for different things, so a generic CV can hold back even the strongest candidates.

Tell an agency Account Director you “owned the brand roadmap for three years” and they might wonder if you can keep up with five briefs landing on a Monday. Tell an in-house Head of Marketing you “managed 14 client accounts at pace” and they might wonder if you’ve ever stuck around long enough to see a campaign through. Send either line to a public sector panel and they’ll be looking for the evidence that proves it.

None of that means your experience isn’t good enough, it just means that your CV needs adapting for different applications!

This means reframing your achievements, language and structure to match what the sector you’re applying to cares about most, while still staying completely honest about what you’ve done.

In this guide, we’ll walk through what agency, in-house and public sector employers each value, how to adapt your CV for each type of move, how to tailor your CV to a job description, and the common mistakes that quietly cost good candidates interviews.

Why your CV needs to change when you switch sectors

Every type of organisation keeps score differently, so learning how to tailor a CV to a job starts with knowing what the reader is counting.

Agencies measure success in clients won, clients kept, briefs delivered and hours billed. Pace and range are the currency. In-house teams care about the business: revenue, retention, customer growth and how well you work with Finance, Product and the leadership team over the long haul. The public sector looks at value for money, service delivery and whether you can show, with evidence, that you meet each criterion in the person specification.

The good news is that most of your skills travel well. Stakeholder management, campaign planning, data analysis, budget ownership and creative problem solving are useful everywhere. The trick is translating them: “Client services” becomes “stakeholder engagement”. “Upsold a retained client” becomes “grew revenue from an existing partner” for example.

Moving from agency to in-house

You’ve juggled more brands than a supermarket shelf, but now you need to show an in-house hiring manager that you can commit to one and make it grow.

Tailoring your CV for this career change means shifting the emphasis from breadth to depth. A long list of client logos is impressive, but on its own it doesn’t tell an in-house team much. Pick your longest-running or most strategic accounts and tell the story of what changed because you were there. Did you take a retailer’s paid social from test budget to its biggest acquisition channel? Did you run a CRM programme that lifted repeat purchase over two years? That’s the language of ownership.

In-house roles also live and die on internal influence and collaboration, so show where you’ve worked alongside a client’s product, finance or trading teams, presented to their senior leadership, or won budget for an idea. That’s stakeholder management, and it’s exactly what an in-house Head of Department will be listening for.

Finally, follow the money... Agency CVs sometimes stop at the deliverable, In-house hiring managers want to see the business result, if you can connect your work to revenue, margin, customer numbers or retention, put it front and centre.

For example: 'Launched Campaign' becomes “launched campaign that drove 18% more online revenue year on year”.

Moving from in-house to agency

Going the other way? Agencies want to know you can switch gears quickly, keep several plates spinning and still deliver great work when the deadline moves forward by a week.

You might have worked for one brand, but you’ve almost certainly handled more variety than you think!  Different product lines, regional markets, campaign launches, internal “clients” in other departments, and multiple agency partners you briefed and managed. 

Show pace, too. In-house CVs can lean towards long-term programmes, so highlight the moments where you turned something round fast: a reactive campaign, a launch brought forward, a crisis handled over a weekend.

And if you’ve ever pitched an idea to a board, written a brief for an agency or presented results to senior leaders, shout about it. Agencies win and keep business by pitching and presenting, so evidence that you’re comfortable in the room is a big plus! 

Applying for public sector roles

A public sector CV is a different beast. Many applications are scored against the essential and desirable criteria in the person specification, often by a panel with a marking sheet, so if you don’t clearly evidence certain criteria, you may not get the marks, however strong you are.

Treat the person specification as your checklist. Use its language where it honestly describes your experience, and make sure every essential criteria is backed up somewhere in your CV or supporting statement. If the spec asks for “experience of managing budgets”, say how big the budget was and what you achieved with it, rather than hoping the panel reads between the lines.

The STAR method is your best friend here. Set out the Situation, the Task, the Action you took and the Result.

For example: a local service had low sign-up rates (Situation), you were asked to increase uptake (Task), you redesigned the digital journey and ran a targeted email campaign (Action), and registrations rose by 30% in six months (Result). Clear, structured and easy to score.

Lastly, reframe outcomes around public value. Revenue and market share matter less here than service delivery, efficiency, accessibility and making the most of public money. “Reduced cost per acquisition by 22%” can become “delivered the same reach for 22% less spend”. Same win, told in a way the panel cares about.

How to tailor your CV to a job description

Whichever direction you’re heading, the job description is the closest thing you’ll get to the answers before the exam. Here’s how to use it!

Start with keywords

Read the advert twice and note the skills, tools and phrases that keep coming up, whether that’s “paid search”, “Salesforce Marketing Cloud”, “stakeholder engagement” or “data visualisation”. Where they genuinely match your experience, use the same wording. Many employers use applicant tracking systems to sift CVs, and a human skim-reading 60 applications will scan for those words too.

Then bring the numbers 

Percentages, budgets, team sizes, timescales and growth figures turn a claim into a fact. “Managed a £1.2m media budget across four channels” beats “responsible for media spend” every single time.

Keep the formatting clean

Simple headings, a clear chronology, consistent dates and no text hidden in tables, graphics or columns that software might struggle to read. Two pages is plenty for most roles. If it doesn’t help you get this particular job, it can probably go.

One tip that saves hours: keep a master CV with everything you’ve ever done, then save a tailored version for each sector. Your agency version, your in-house version and your public sector version can all start from the same source, so you’re editing rather than rewriting from scratch every time.

Common CV mistakes when changing sectors (and how to improve your CV)

We read a lot of CVs... these are the issues we see most often when people cross between sectors, and they’re all easy to fix.

The first is jargon. Every sector has its own shorthand. Agency life has WIPs, retainers and status meetings; in-house has OKRs and quarterly business reviews; the public sector has its own acronyms for almost everything. If the reader won’t recognise a term, swap it for plain English.

The second is listing duties instead of outcomes. “Responsible for social media” tells us what was on your job description. “Grew Instagram engagement by 40% in a year” tells us what you actually did with it. If you want to improve your CV quickly, go through each bullet and ask, “So what happened?”

The third is the one-size-fits-all CV. Sending the same document to an agency, a retailer and a council is like wearing the same outfit to a festival, a board meeting and a wedding. It might technically work, but it won’t be your best look. A tailored CV takes longer, but it lands far more interviews.

And finally, don’t forget the rest of your toolkit. If your CV says “commercially minded in-house marketer” but your LinkedIn headline still says “Account Manager at a creative agency”, hiring managers will notice. Line up your LinkedIn profile and cover letter with the story your CV is telling.

Ready for your next move?

Switching sectors is one of the best ways to grow your career, and your experience is probably more transferable than you think. A tailored CV  helps hiring managers see how you would fit their world. A few small changes in framing can be the difference between “not quite the right background” and “when can they start?”

Looking for your next role? Explore our latest jobs across agency, in-house and public sector roles in Marketing, Digital, Data and Technology, or send your CV to our team.

Hiring? If you’re looking for people with the right transferable skills, we’d love to help! Partner with Forward Role and we’ll connect you with the brightest talent from across agency, in-house and public sector backgrounds. Get in touch!

FAQs

Should I tailor my CV for every job application?

Yes, though it doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Keep a master CV and a version for each sector, then spend 15 to 20 minutes tweaking your profile, key achievements and keywords to match each job description. It’s time well spent.

How do I move from agency to in-house without in-house experience?

Focus on the long-term client relationships where you had real ownership, and show the business results your work delivered, not just the campaigns. Highlight any time you worked closely with a client’s internal teams or senior leaders, because that’s the closest thing to in-house experience and employers know it.

What do public sector employers look for in a CV?

Clear evidence that you meet the criteria in the person specification. Use structured examples (the STAR method works well), match the language of the role where it’s accurate, and frame your achievements around service delivery, efficiency and value for money.