Make your CV work for you - our advice...

CVs Matter - Take Our Advice!

I’ll keep this simple – CV's matter. I’ve seen people get nowhere in their job search and as soon as their CV was changed had to bat prospective employers away. And I’m not exaggerating! I spend a lot of time helping people with their CVs because it’s worth the time and effort. It’s even more important that your CV works hard if you’re not going via an agency because you don’t have a consultant to fill in the gaps or add context. Your CV must do that for itself.

Here are some general pointers (relevant in most cases, but as with everything there are exceptions):

* Layout: Don’t go for fancy designs – keep it simple and in a standard font. The aim is to make it easy to skim read initially as most will only read it cover to cover if they find what they want at skim reading stage. Use bold highlights to make information you want to highlight jump off the page. Don’t have blocky text, use bullets to break it up. Make it concise but give enough detail (a hard one to explain). Also, don’t use the LinkedIn pre-made CV…it looks lazy.

* Photos: My rule is don’t include one. What you look like doesn’t affect your ability to do the job, so it isn’t relevant.

Employment: Include name, job title and dates. Add a line that says what the company does. If it’s Coca Cola you don’t need to, but often a hiring manager won’t have heard of the company you’ve worked for so make it easy for them. If you work for an agency, list your clients (or at the very least the sectors you work across).

* Education: Include where you studied and what you studied. The grade(s) for your most recent qualification(s) matter. In most cases we don’t need to know the grade you got for every GCSE.

* Length: 2 pages is usually enough (don’t try to cram it into 1 page – there needs to be a level of detail. If you’re very senior there’s sometimes a case to go onto 3 pages). Apart from your 2/3 most recent roles we don’t need to see full detail about the roles you held in the past. Usually just the company, job title and dates are enough. It’s different of course if one of these older roles was directly relevant to what you’re applying for. The truth is, hiring managers and recruiters skim read initially so make it easy for us.

* Keywords: Think SEO. Make your CV mirror the job description of the role you’re going for by using the same language and including keywords likely to jump out to the person reading it. I’m not advocating you lie here; it must be true – always – what I’m saying is there are different ways of saying the same thing.

And finally, don’t include things like your date of birth, age, relationship status or full address (just a city will do) – again it’s not relevant to whether or not you can do the job. Don’t give people any reason to discriminate against you, consciously or unconsciously.

There’s a lot said about CVs and everyone has their own opinion. These are just mine. Other opinions are always welcome!