Is your Curriculum Vitae helping you to move forward... or
holding you back?
A strong Curriculum Vitae is essential if you want to get ahead.
Having worked in executive recruitment during the 1980s and
1990s, I became fascinated by the first impression people chose
to make. I saw time and again that the individuals who invested
their effort into making a first class CV presentation were the
ones who secured the most interesting and best paid jobs.
Traditional CV writing styles and techniques have become
obsolete and the rules have changed, those "in the know" reap
the benefits.
Writing your Curriculum Vitae or CV can be a nightmare. What
should it include - what can you leave out - what order should
it all go in - why is it so difficult to get the format looking
good. Keeping it updated can often be an unwelcome chore when
time is precious; the free Curriculum Vitae template packages
available out there are more often than not pretty well
impossible to adapt yourself and provide no useful guidance
about how to describe your experience and tailor them for
specific job requirements so that your CV will appeal to
professional recruiters and give you the advantage you want.
Choosing the right structure for your CV is essential, first of
all the CV you use to introduce yourself to prospective
employers should be just two pages long. Thousands and thousands
of CV's go straight in the bin simply because they are too long.
There are two basic structures for the information in your CV,
the chronological or functional approach. Recruiters
occasionally talk about a hybrid CV - a CV that uses a mixture
of both approaches; another description for the hybrid might be
"a CV that lacks a logical structure and is often difficult to
read". When writing your CV plan what deserves prominence and
what messages you want or need to get across. With 20 years
experience and having reviewed tens of thousands of CV's I know
that Curriculum Vitae content is usually totally inadequate,
providing either far too much detail or not nearly enough!
The first page of your Curriculum Vitae will determine the
response you get - if the content does not grab the recruiter's
attention it is very unlikely they will read on. Starting your
CV with a summary can be an excellent way of catching the
reader's attention. Here you can highlight your 'key selling
points' and generally set the scene for all that follows.
Alternatively for technical specialists, professionals and
academics, qualifications are often a critical component of the
recruitment criteria and so you may want to give this priority.
Things that should be left out in particular are for example
details of 'reasons for leaving', do not mention that you were
'head hunted', you may have been flattered but from a
prospective employer's point of view the head hunter persuaded
you to leave your employment - and may do again.
Hobbies and interests should only be detailed when they say
something positive about you that is not apparent from your
career history. Hobbies such as reading swimming, TV and
restaurants etc are not going to add much; describing high risk
interests such as parachuting, diving with sharks or sword
swallowing may influence the reader not to interview you.