If you search online for advice on preparing your CV, you will
find a whole world of contradictory tips, guidelines, rules and warnings.
Most sites/articles will undoubtedly offer some great
advice, and broadly speaking there are some rights and wrongs that should be
adhered to, but when it boils down to it, it’s the relevance of your experience
that will secure you an interview, not the layout of your CV.
This isn't to say that you can’t decrease your chances of securing an interview by sending through a
badly designed CV however. There are definitely ‘wrong’ ways to present your
CV, and you can undermine years of relevant experience with poor spelling and
grammar, or by hiding away the key skills and achievements somewhere they’ll
get overlooked.
In my opinion, the key to a successful CV is to keep things
simple and ensure that the first page provides the reader with quick and clear
access to the most pertinent skills and experience relevant to the role you are
applying for. This will most likely include your academic achievements and
qualifications, your IT/Systems experience and details of your current or most
recent experience. Your goal should be
to secure an interview before they’ve even reached the second page!
Here are my tips on how to write an effective CV:
- Ignore any ‘golden rules’ on the ideal number of pages your CV should cover. If you have many years experience and/or lots of achievements and experience don’t leave it out just so you can squeeze it in to two pages.
- Make sure your qualifications and skills (e.g. systems, languages) are at the top of page one, followed by your current position and then working backwards through you career from there. If a potential employer is only interested in the last few years, it’s no problem if they decide to skip pages 3 and 4.
- Lay off the clever formatting. Fancy borders and embossed headers may look pretty, but your CV’s not going to get framed and hung up on a wall. Better to just keep it looking clean & simple and let your experience do the wooing.
- Spell-check is not infallible. When you think you've finished, take a break from the screen, have a cup of tea and then re-read it one last time. Slowly!
- Personal profiles. A topic that I’ll come back to soon in a blog of its own, but for now, try to avoid clichés and statements that offer no examples or evidence to back them up.
Finally, I know some
social-media champions will have you believe the traditional CV/resume is on
its deathbed and a job seeker will soon only need an online professional
profile, but I'm pretty confident it’s got at least a few years left in it for
now, so hopefully this blog will remain relevant for a little while yet.
If you’ve got a different view
to those above, or have any other CV tips you’d like to share, please do add a
comment below.
