Why 'Worked at a Small Business' Is the Best Line on Any CV

Four words tell me more than four pages of corporate history. Worked at a small business. That is the line I look for, and most recruiters scroll straight past it.

Here is what those four words actually mean. You cashed up at the end of a shift. You covered when someone had to leave in a hurry. You figured out something that was not in any manual because there was no manual. You probably sat across three or four different functions in the same week because there was nobody else to do it.

Big company experience teaches you to follow a process that someone else designed. Small business experience teaches you how a business actually runs, because you were running parts of it before you were qualified to. That is a different education entirely, and it is one that does not appear on any prospectus.

If you are starting out and you want to know what I would tell you, it is this: try to get yourself into a small independent first. Ask if you can sit in on the accountancy meetings. Ask if you can spend a day with whoever handles the marketing. Get involved in the edges of things, because the edges are where you learn. In a small business, nobody minds you asking, because everyone is already doing three jobs and they could use another pair of hands.

Community is not a word that appears on job descriptions, but it is the thing that small businesses run on. When you work inside one you understand it by feel. You know what it costs to keep the lights on. You know what a quiet Tuesday does to the mood. You know your boss's name and your boss knows yours, and that changes how you think about work in ways that are difficult to explain but very easy to spot on a person.

The businesses that shaped the most capable people I have ever hired were not the ones with the graduate schemes. They were the ones where someone had to close up alone on a Friday night and figure it out. If that was you, that is worth something. Send your story to keepthemopen.com.