What is the latest thing in CV writing then? I’ve not done mine in about 6 years and looking at it now it looks a bit amateurish so what’s good for…

Length/number of pages
Layout, what first etc
Font
How much detail
How would you put details of courses? E.g. I’m Prince 2ed, put it with my education details?
Spacing? Lots of white space and many pages or keep it tight?
Do you put anything about personal interests etc?

Any other modern fancyness?
Ta

Here’s what I would recommend both having worked in recruitment and now as as hiring manager. Remember it is a hugely competitive market at the moment, so your CV needs to really sell you.

It’s less about your qualifications than the value and results you can bring to the business.

2 pages max.

Name
Contact details
Headline paragraph, 2 sentences to sell yourself. “Elevator pitch” – Why should I even read on and think about hiring you?
Experience including major professional acheievements (ie projects & results, benefits to employer of what you did)
Education
Out of work interests.

Hope this helps!

🙂

Pfff there is no rules, but if I were you, once the CV is done I’ll hang it on the wall and see what is the first thing that stands out.
Second, the CV shouldn’t be too long, unless it’s for academia. It should be as tailor made as possible for the job. That’s all I can think off. Good luck with the Jobs.

Give them something, a handle, play a maverick card….

You know…..
the idiot who sent his CV on pink paper
the bloodletter
the one who shaves his legs and wears lycra

Sifting through CVs is terminally boring. Give them a lift.

SB

It’s as long as it needs to be, this “two pages” thing is guff. In my industry, you can easily see skills and qualifications that run to two pages before you’ve even started on the regular stuff.

I’ve seen people try and meet this mythical golden rule by writing in 4pt Flyspec with no margins or white space. Awful.

Don’t write ‘Curriculum Vitae’ at the top.

they know what it is.

Yep, don’t write curriculum vitae at the top

2 pages, 3 if it absolutely has to be

Write it in the third person and past tense (no I, we, me)

Some white space is good, too much and you’ll be over 2 pages

Play with margins to give more room for words on the page but remember that some white space is good

Headline achievements with results/measures at the top (after name address etc)

For each job, write a short description of your duties, say 2 sentences, then bullet point your achievements WITH MEASURES (Generated a cost saving of x through the implementation of y. Delivered a project with contract value x for y client on time and x% under budget/providing client with z benefit/capability blah blah)

Incorporate key words so you pop up in searches

I use arial narrow 11 pt and it looks ok. I’ve also played a little with a combination of black and dark grey font to make it easier on the eye.

Don’t bother with interests unless they are relevant to the role you are after.

Include a link to linkedin if you use it. If your a pm then linkedin is a must.

Do you have a unique selling point? I worked in Iraq for a bit so I’ve squeezed that into the headline as its a good talking point.

I’m becoming an expert in this field having landed a good job in may this year with my cv then having been made redundant from it 2 weeks ago. I also got outplacement support including an excellent cv review which flagged a lot of the above up.

Hope that helps.

I do some of this for a living so you could try the following:

84% of our clients get new careers via the unadvertised job market where a cv seems less important. CV’s seem mainly for recruiters where 16% of our clients are finding careers.

CV’s
Chronological if continuing the same career track (recruiter pref I think)
Key skills if career change
Hybrid if a bit of both.
Two pages if poss, though not always. (13 is the longest I have seen)

Running order:

Name and contact details
Personal statement
Content of most recent stuff (no more than 10 yrs) with what you achieved, not what you did. Facts figures.
Post ten yr old roles bullet pointed
Quals, all earnt, not bought.
Prof Associations
D.O.B
Interests.

Thats my 2penneth, others may have a different format.

Pm me for some templates but the interweb is as good as any.

HTH, Rick

I’m going to follow this one as I need to update mine in the next few weeks.

My personal preferences are, what were you actually responsible for, not what did the company do. If you have listed technologies at the start of the cv, then don’t repeat them after each job description. If you talk about an area of a project, the expect to be asked to explain it, to go into detail, to justify decisions about it. Can you tell I’m not the biggest fan of recruiting at the moment?

There are some more positive and useful tips above this post though 🙂

Ta muchly – any more advice is appreciated

*Goes to delete words “curriculum vitae” from top of old CV!

Good timing. I have to update mine tomorrow. Did it not long ago (job was withdrawn, so never got any feedback). I’d rather like this one, so don’t want to f— it up.

I note no-one has suggested people include a link to their STW login….

Only if you’re a big hitter. But tbh they should already know, if you are.

(13 is the longest I have seen)

Really? Mine runs to 13 pages; in my line of work (not academia) that is neither unusual nor the longest I’ve seen.

Andy

Don’t put your date of birth on it!

Sifting through CVs is terminally boring. Give them a lift.

Im sure my CV generally provides a good laugh

Just glad it’s you and not me, CV writing is so **** tedious

Oh and I forgot to say, for each bullet point achievement on your CV, write a STAR (Google it – Situation, Task, Action, Result). Don’t give this to anyone but it ensures that any thinking you need to do about the achievements is done in your own time on the STAR and not in front of the interviewer!

You’re right, writing cv’s is a PITA.

Good advice up there

Also get someone else to review, the amount of times my wife has spotted a typo even though I’ve read it several times, because I know what I want to read rather than what I’ve actually written…

some good tips, and heres a couple of things not mentioned that bug me.

make sure you print preview your CV, nothing worse than if i need to print a CV to review or call back and find i have to spend 5 mins editing it so it prints correctly.

If i have to forward a cv on i do not want to have to amend it first.

Think! if i were reviewing this CV what would i want to see? or would not want to see. keep it relevant and easy to review.

Reviewed about a dozen recently and was surprised how similar they were, but they were from various Agencies.

Best ones were about 4 pages broken down into table of qualifications, table of technical experience for how long etc. Table of roles / skill-sets with reference to positions or projects. That covered first 2 pages. Positions or projects were expanded on maybe half an A4 each as annexes.

Almost like a competence based job application and told you all you needed to know.

As a hiring manager I hate …

Headline paragraph, 2 sentences to sell yourself. “Elevator pitch” – Why should I even read on and think about hiring you?

…but others will love it.

I work in engineering and round here we can be fairly traditional in terms of CVs. That sort of thing is seen as airy-fairy BS included by people whose qualifications and experience don’t sell themselves. The logic, if there is any, is that the CV proves you have the capability, the interview would prove you have the fit/personal qualities for the organisation.

In other lines of work, or perhaps just other companies, leaving it out would be suicide – the earlier comment on tailoring your CV to both the job and organisation applies.

Edit: actually some of the HR types like personal statements and you often have to get by them to get to the hiring manager.

Out of interest, are the people with long CVs software contractors? You know we only read the first two pages right? 🙂

Make sure the skills required for the job are listed at the top (use columns if you have to). Elevator pitch can be useful, but no BS or flowery language. For each job (newest first), list your key tasks, responsibilities and any specific tangible achievements that are relevant.

Just keep the formatting simple. If you’re going through an agency they tend to mangle it anyway.

Good luck!

Out of interest, are the people with long CVs software contractors?

No. Don’t work in IT in any form, unusually for STW.

Is it ok to state in your ‘elevator pitch’ what your career goals are? “Aspiring analyst”?

1 page
Name
Date of birth
And the following link –
http://singletrackworld.com/forum/profile/jfletch

What more could thy possibly need to know 🙂

wallop – Member
Is it ok to state in your ‘elevator pitch’ what your career goals are? “Aspiring analyst”?

CV readers are looking for the facts – what skills you have, your level of skill, and how much you contributed to your previous companies – and they are also looking for reasons to stick your CV on the “no” pile. If you stick to facts then there are less reasons to reject you. Any training or out of hours work you have put in towards your goal shows some drive but words like “aspiring” are almost worse than useless as it allows them to question why you haven’t done anything about it. Save it for the interview?

Depends on the nature of the job really, for IT tech jobs I don’t believe in the 2 page rule. I certainly want to get the main info in two pages but I also want to see people expend on previous roles in more detail than just a couple of lines. I want info on projects they’ve been involved in, what tech skills they used, what their role was. So many CVs I got for the last senior tech role I recruited for were so brief in this area I had to waste my time telephone interviewing just to find out they’d way over-embellished things and actually just had a very minor project role and no real experience in that tech area.
I did want to see a skills summary on page one and be able to get a fairly good impression of the person’s experience by the end of page two (so I could short-list them or not).

Type it in notepad, so you spend more time thinking about the content rather than style.

I found saving my CV as a PDF and then using the Read Out Loud in Adobe Reader very useful for picking up typos and clumsy sentences. All of which I failed to spot when I read through it to check it!

I work in engineering and round here we can be fairly traditional in terms of CVs. That sort of thing is seen as airy-fairy BS included by people whose qualifications and experience don’t sell themselves. The logic, if there is any, is that the CV proves you have the capability, the interview would prove you have the fit/personal qualities for the organisation.

I guess this is where the elevator pitch comes into play in roles where qualifications very often carry little value, for example sales/business development/marketing etc where it’s about what you can do and have done, rather than a qualification (in my profession there’s very little by way of qualifications so it’s all about quantifiable results, hence the elevator pitch), although I can see for more qualification or certification led sectors it makes sense!

🙂

(in my profession there’s very little by way of qualifications so it’s all about quantifiable results, hence the elevator pitch)

I guess there’s also a question of cultures, over in The States I imagine you look at the CV in a different light.

Wallop, our company research suggests that leaving a DOB off a cv isn’t helpful. Although age discrimination is illegal, we have found that if there is no DOB then folk will add 5+ years to your actual age.

Just reading a BBC article about machine read CV’s, looks like keyword “tags” may be the next cv thing to come along…

Again,
84% of our clients find careers via unadvertised opportunities.
16% find opportunities via advertised and recruiter methods.

Get networking people, thats where the opportunities seem to be and you don’t need to compete with others CV’s and the Applicant Tracking Systems sorting you in or out..

Possibly ‘aspiring’ is the same as ‘not’. So if you say ‘aspiring database analyst’ for example, that implies person who doesn’t know much about databases. I know when we write papers, we’re always told to be wary of anything titled ‘towards X’, because that typically means ‘tried to do X but haven’t managed it’.

I have to do different style CVs now for academia, but when I was doing software development stuff, I seemed to have success with:

name, contact details (very brief, don’t bung loads of junk on there, recruiters will take it off anyway)

4 or 5 bullet points (been a developer for 15 years, 5 years professional experience, list of about 15 languages and technologies I’ve been paid to develop with, 1st class degree in CS, lead developer on project teams of x people)

Hobs: (each job stating a)dates, job title, a thing I did there that demonstrates some knowledge and independent ability (eg. designed and developed feature x, which does something jolly clever using genetic algorithms and was jolly important to the company). Don’t write rubbish about team players and all that – something concrete that you did, and that can be demonstrated, and that shows skills that you want to push.

Qualifications:
For me this was one sentence – Xth class degree from X university + 4 a levels grades ABCD. I don’t bother with subjects for the a levels. If you’re applying for more certification type jobs then it might be bigger, but no one cares about your gcse and grade 5 piano.

Interests:
I put a very brief personal statement in saying that I’m a mountain unicyclist, swimmer, runner, and that I play the piano. Or something similar to that. I put it in for two reasons – firstly it gives me a guaranteed easy interview question about mountain unicycling, which is nice, and makes the interviewer remember me. Secondly, whilst it shouldn’t do, it has the potential to get you looked at by people who share your interests; I’ve had chats about piano playing in interviews before, and I’m pretty sure that it helped. Don’t bother with interests if you don’t have any though (or if they are going to the pub and watching TV).

Rickmeister I agree with what you are saying although in the IT industry the percentage split of non advertised/advertised jobs is 50/50. Not sure if the op is in IT though. Either way, networking is critical as you say.

I also heard that the it market is saturated with PM’s at the moment which I can well believe so you have a lot of competition in that sector if you’re in it, making the advice above even more important.

I had a phone interview yesterday which went well and I was immediately invited in for a face to face later this week. I got on well with the 2 guys who interviewed me but it was only 20 mins. I wondered about linking up with the interviewer on linkedin afterwards but decided against it as I wouldn’t have liked someone to do that to me when I was the interviewer. Anybody got any views on this?

I asked about “aspiring” because I’m at a bit of a crossroads and will be applying for roles that could lead on to what I want to do in the future. Sounds like it is a bad idea though.

imnotamused – I have loads of recruitment agents + colleagues in my LinkedIn network (including my bosses – but we’re a small company of 30)

And I agree on the “aspiring = not there yet”. Aspiring means you could have been “trying to get there” for the past 10 years.

xiphon, yes so do I but this was a potential employer who interviewed me – I don’t have the job yet.

And I agree on the “aspiring = not there yet”. Aspiring means you could have been “trying to get there” for the past 10 years.

I also assume that aspiring doesn’t carry any weight unless you can show me experience. That’s to say a friend of mine has been working as the acting boss while not being titled the boss. She can demonstrate not just her aspirations, but her experience in the role. This would get the nod over an aspirational candidate.

Ahhh sorry, got my wires crossed.