What
is a CV?
What exactly is a Curriculum Vitae?
Is it a List of your Skills and Experience? Is it a Mini
Biography? Is it a chance to get someone to fully
appreciate your Skills and Achievements?
Truth be known, It’s none of these.
A CV in its purest form is nothing
more and nothing less than a chance to market yourself
to prospective recruiters and employers to increase your
chances of being invited to an interview. A CV is an
Interview-Winning Tool. It is not a Personal Biography,
or a List of your skills and experience, it is a fluid
document which means different things to different
people, but is relevant to all.
CV
Myths:
-
Before looking at what makes a
good CV, lets first dispel a few myths:
-
‘The more they know about me,
the more chance they have of being impressed’
-
Wrong! Too many people make the
mistake of thinking that the more information they
can cram onto their CV the better. This is not the
case.
'My CV
should detail everything I’ve ever done. Ever.’
-
Wrong! Employers don’t want to
know about the time you worked as an office junior
for acme chemicals when you were 16 and just left
school, if you’re now a 45-year-old senior manager
with 26 years experience under your belt!
-
It doesn’t matter if my CV
doesn’t look perfect, my experience will be enough
to impress any employer’
-
Wrong! If you’re CV is not
easily readable, employers will simply bin it, and
move on to the next one. Why should they spend
valuable time trying to digest your CV when they
have 300 other applications to look through?
What
Do Employers look for?
-
When preparing your CV it’s
very important to write it with your audience in
mind. What will they be looking for? What specific
skills and experience will they want to see in
candidates? By thinking hard about what your
prospective employers are looking for, you be in a
better position to write a more effective CV.
As a
rule, your CV will impress an employer if it displays
the following:
Ask you friends or colleagues to
read your CV and see if they can tell the exact position
you are looking for. If they can’t, neither will your
employer, and they may not understand why you are
applying to work in the position they are offering.
Can your prospective employer look
at your CV and tell exactly what is you are doing at
this exact point in time? If not, you are leaving this
to their imagination – Keep your CV up to date and
eliminate all doubt!
Does your CV clearly detail your
achievements, or are they hidden with your
responsibilities? Is your CV a concise two pages in
length, or is it more like a five page essay? Is your CV
Crammed with dense, hard to read writing, or is there
plenty of ‘White Space’. If your CV is not easy to read,
it will not be read.
Sound
Tricky?
Writing an effective CV is one of
the most difficult tasks you will ever have to do for
your job search. It is an accepted fact that is
incredibly difficult for an individual to write an
effective CV because they do not have the ability to be
objective – Every piece of information is important and
cannot be edited or removed. This leads to a very
cluttered, difficult to read CV. It is worth considering getting
your CV Professionally Prepared by Independent
Consultants, as they have the objectivity and experience
required to pull out the most relevant bits of
information, and focus on what employers want to see,
not what you want them to see.
