Don't lie. Exaggerate maybe but if you lie you just get caught out sooner or later.
I had to do a "Back to Work" seminar last week. It's now obligatory in first 8 weeks on Jobseekers (in Stoke/Newcastle-under-Lyme area anyway).
It was actually quite useful.
A bit of advise I hadn't heard before is to remove your age/DoB from your CV. It makes sense. Interviewers are inundated with applications for every position. And you probably know very few people have much time to devote to any task including recruiting new staff. So don't put in anything that will be an easy negative. Obviously age descrimination is a no-no but at the first reading/skimming stage only the reader will know what lead them to bin any CV.
Don't make your CV too long – again time and patience issue. Advised length is 2 sides of A4. I was struggling with mine to get below 3. Then reduced the font to 10point rather than 11 and with deleting/compressing a couple of sentences I got it down to 2 sides and not too small to make reading hard.
Prepare a general CV that covers your skills, experience, education but be prepared to create edits to target specific jobs.
What sector/job you in?
If you're engineering/IT/managerial type roles e-mail me at bikeandy61@gmail and I'll give you the names and addresses of a number of agencies that may help you find jobs.
Get your CV on to Jobsite, I've been amazed how many agencies have picked mine up off there and contacted me.
Not that I've had an interview in 5 months.
Get started now while you still have a job. Don't wait.
Hope this helps and best of luck.
