RECRUITMENT MYTHBUSTERS – Volume 3, Your CV- Does Size Matter?

Other than getting to make a little risqué pun that made me laugh out loud at my desk at how witty I am, in all seriousness this is the question I get asked the most in recruitment by literally everyone that turns to me for help in their job hunt.

“But Kat, how can I write a CV that details all my successes when I only have two pages?!”

Right, who started this… nonsense?* If I ever find you, I will smack you upside the head and howl at you like a banshee. Two pages is a teeny, tiny space to try and describe your working career on. It’s only appropriate if you’re a fresh and clean graddy with limited experience, or maybe you’ve had like one role your entire career and never developed beyond a singular position or achieved much in that. A CV is your platform. Your place to shout about your achievements and de-mistify what crazy garbage your company has assigned you to very plainly outline two simple things, like I said in Volume 2 of Recruitment Mythbusters-

WHAT YOU DO AND HOW WELL YOU DO IT.

It really is that simple. No, I’m not kidding. I know this seems insignificant but good lord in the hundreds of thousands of CV’s I’ve read I can tell you that it seems that less than 1% of the population can keep this in mind and put it into practice.

Now I’m not saying you should go wild and suddenly all create 10+ pages (my personal hall of shame award went to a 17 page CV) but I want to encourage every single person reading this to relax if the CV is 3 or 4 pages long. If the information is relevant a recruiter will keep reading it. Relevance is key. An alarming amount of CV’s I’ve read just regurgitate the corporate claptrap generated by their HR team. If you look at a CV and it says something like;

“I was responsible with the development and delivery of the launch and clear articulation of the transformation strategy through engagement collateral, internal-led events and follow-up communications activities” **

Do we have any idea what this person does? Do we even know if they’re good at it? Do we even care anymore or are we literally ready to tear out our own eyeballs? The answer is NO to all of it, apart from maybe a soft yes to ripping out the eyeballs. Who the hell talks like that? It’s so unnatural. This person was redesigning an internal comms strategy about a business unit transformation, so they designed a program and all the associated communication materials, launched it and then made sure they followed it up on different platforms.

The take away from this point is the essence of keeping it simple. Type how you talk. Then make it commercial and relevant. Everyone can add how their performance benefitted a business. Did you find a new way of working that saved time, money or both? Waaaahey! Did you deliver a scope of work that was in any way measured? Quantify it, put in some facts, figures, numbers and percentages.

If you’re in a sales or bids role put your financial gains. If you worked in accounts and finance talk about the invoices you resolved or credits you recouped. IT service desk? How many tickets do you close and the average time to resolve a problem. Customer service, look at an NPS score or SOMETHING. Literally everyone can do this. Once you’ve put in your quantifiable information, you add your sprinkle of soft skills and you've got a pretty tasty CV.

What Jobseekers are also really guilty of is cracking in lots of industry or company specific abbreviations or jargon. If you’re applying for roles in your own industry, then this isn’t a problem. But it’s a massive, enormous problem when you’re hoping to transfer industries. The more jargon and irrelevant bumpf you’re putting in your CV the more you distance yourself in the eyes of the hiring team (manager and recruiter) from being suitable for the role. If you’re wondering how to strip it out, imagine you were telling someone down the pub what you do for a living and they asked you to tell them more. You’d keep it accessible, right? Good, aye, so do the same for your CV.

A few final common sense rules and pointers;

• Your most recent job should have the most information and then scale it down from there. If you have been in the same company and changed roles multiple times, treat them all as separate sub-headings and decrease the level of detail.
• Your personal statement should briefly summarise who you are professionally and what you want to do with your next career move.
• If you’re relocating, pop the address you know you would use in the area as a temporary base. Make sure you explain this in your personal statement.
• If you have a gap in your CV, please try and explain it. We will ask you about it. Just get over it.
• If you have some… unusual interests (and yes, I mean those that are less than vanilla!) perhaps best to leave them OFF your resume. Does that really need to be what defines you?
• If you’re applying for a role with specific qualifications requested… do make sure you put them on your CV.
• When in doubt, record yourself reading your CV. If it doesn’t sound like you, re-write it again.

So. With the combined advice of Volume 2 and Volume 3 of Mythbusters, you now have a markedly better CV that will hopefully make a difference in your applications and get you some more interviews. Which neatly ties into what we’re doing next week…

Next time on Recruitment Mythbusters… Why you’re not getting the callback you want after the interview.

* (I have re-written this sentence so many time, with words that rhymed with fish, ball-pit, slap but all of them would have gotten me in grief and I’m trying to buck my natural instinct to make this series as blue as a Janey Godley special)

** Yes, this is a line from a CV I’ve read. This, it transpires, was from the internal job description.