Is there really an art to putting together a CV, is a couple of sheets of A4 really what they want, or what about something more creative and a little less main stream? Obviously it's dependent on the type of job, but I was just curious as to what your thoughts are?

Length depends on industry – in some industries they want 1 sheet A4, most are 2 sheets, academic / medical etc. they have massive CVs, with things like publication lists. Art / design etc., people tend to do portfolios / showreels or something as well as a CV which are a whole new thing.

They want it very simple and easy to read. A lot of people look at each CV for something like 10 seconds, if you can't get a rough idea of what you're like from the first couple of paragraphs / bullet points or something near the top, then they'd just dump it.

Joe

2 sheets, don't make it fancy use plain text and use headings. just provide the basics like previous 'relevant' employment, education, qualifications and pass times, you may get interviewed by a dude who MTB's but hopefully doesn't read the singletrackworld forums…

As above. I've just secured a new job and at interview, my new boss told me that my CV stood out because it was short, with my profile, skills and knowledge all laid out in the first two, easily readable paragraphs.

I work in creative stuff and my one page skills based CV was reckoned to be pretty good by a guy running a CV workshop thing we did at work.

By the way minor grammatical errors like putting an apostrophe in CVs will put some people off straight away. 😉