Pre-planning your CV can make all the difference to your job application. By Duncan Brodie, director of leadership development company, Goals and Achievements.
Almost all organisations request individuals to submit a CV (also known as a resume) when recruiting.
As a job applicant, you have one overall objective - to get to the next stage of the selection process (usually an interview). You need a CV that can sell you to get over the first hurdle. You need a powerful CV that gets results.
The mistake most people make
When writing your CV, it is really tempting to just sit down in front of your computer and start typing. The problem with this approach is that it misses out the vital pre CV creation phase.
What is the creation phase?
This phase will help you get everything straight. Make sure you:
- are clear about what an employer is looking for in skills, knowledge, experience, education and attributes
- brainstorm your strengths – the strengths that could make a difference to the success of the organisation you want to join
- identify your major achievements in the different roles you’ve had. People can focus too narrowly on their current job and forget about their previous achievements
- establish the qualities that set you apart from other candidates. You may have a certain type of experience, or sector expertise, or even achieved in an area outside work that few people have been involved in.
Your aim is to create a list of the key ingredients that will make you an automatic interview choice.
Five essentials
When you’ve done your pre CV work, you’ll be well positioned to produce a CV that gets results. Take a moment to think about the recipient of your CV before you start on the five essentials below. Chances are, the recipient will be fairly senior. That means they’re likely to be extremely busy, have a lot of competing priorities, have limited time to review CVs, but will want to review them effectively and efficiently.
So what are the five essentials?
Start with a profile
A profile is just a few sentences or bullet points that summarise you and sell what you have to offer. Include points like sector experience, specialist knowledge, and attributes that capture your working essence or philosophy.
Focus on achievements
Employers want to know about your results.
While it is useful to give a sentence or two about the size of your organisation and the number of people you manage, what employers are really interested in is your achievements.
For example, your achievements might include being part of a team that automated a manual process; dealt with a merger; reduced debtor collection days; generated a higher return on cash investments; or delivered a major project on time and within budget. If you’ve done your pre CV stage properly, you will have more examples than you can use.
Make your CV easy for the reader
Leave plenty of white space on your document, to split information into sections. Use bullets and lists where possible. This will make your CV much easier for an employer to skim read.
Match your experience to the role
Demonstrate that you already have a lot of the skills the job profile requires. For example, if you see a requirement for someone with experience of running projects, think of everything you’ve been involved in. You probably have experience of budget setting and annual accounts. Successful results in these areas depends on good project management and good management of the various activities in that project. That’s an example of experience of running projects.
Avoid information overload
If you have extensive experience, your challenge will be to keep your CV succinct without omitting relevant information. A good strategy is to use a supplementary information document to show a match between requirements and specific experience. A simple table created in Word can be extremely useful for this.
CVs are still the most common way of determining who will be selected for interview. Make the time to create a CV that sells you as a logical choice for interview.
Links
Goals and Achievements
CIMA MYJOBS job search guidance