If you think about it, your CV (if you are from abroad, your résumé is called a CV [curriculum Vitae] in the UK), is an exercise in personal branding and marketing. It is a sales document – selling you! As with great marketing or advertising campaigns, for great products, your brand, should stand out above the competition. That’s exactly where you CV comes in.
Fail to spend enough time on your CV and your application for your dream job will fall at the first hurdle. A CV tells a prospective employer everything they would need to know about you before inviting you in for an interview – it is a tool used by the recruiter to tick boxes.
So, using the marketing analogy, your CV is the advert which persuades the employer to consider you. Regardless of the position, short or long-term, your CV is crucial. Often, candidates shortlisted for the interview stage are those who provided the employer with the best quality CV and Covering Letter. Without your CV being up to scratch, you won’t even get through the door.
1) Summarise your responsibilities with the STAR system
STAR System
The first step is using the STAR System to create your personal marketing and will form the basis of your objective statement and career sections of your CV and your covering letter.
Situation – the background.
Task– the task and goal which you where required to fulfil.
Action– the action taken by you to achieve the goal
Result– exactly what it says on the tin.
Every piece of writing in all of your personal marketing should consist of stories using this system.
Go back to your job description vs. personal spec sheet and add a fourth column, like so.
| Target Position | You | Real experience | |
| Objective of the role and job functions | Add the red information and any from your own research which you feel are vital to the role and company | Here you add the matches from your own career experience. | In this column add basic examples of where you used your skills, both listed and perceived, to achieve similar and desirable objectives to those required, both listed and perceived. There’s no need for too much detail at this point, you can add it later when you hone it – this will form the basis of the STAR system. |
| Skills | Add the skills highlighted in blue. | Here list your own skills relevant to the role – and any which you posses which are not listed but which you feel are relevant – highlight them a different colour. | |
| Soft Skills | ‘Hungry to Succeed’ These personal skills are often left out but are essential to the role. |
Add your own personal attributes here – list them all. |
Got that down? Great, now let’s start building your objective statement. Your objective statement is the statement at the top of your CV which tells your employer what you’re about.
Objective Statement:
The cornerstone of any CV, covering letter and interview is your personal statement. But how to write it properly? Often we just make a vague statement of what we believe the employer wants. This is the wrong way to approach the objective statement – you need to be cleverer than that.
If Your CV is a personal marketing too, the objective statement is call to action – your personal sales pitch. The Objective statement should perform the following functions:
SHOW you have made or saved money. For creative roles it should show the ideas/creativity which have led to savings/innovations/sales
SHOW your skills – for career changers this is imperative showing your transferable skills making up for lack of experience.
SHOW the employer what you want to achieve.
Creative writers have a great little mantra: SHOW don’t TELL. Simply this means, in this context, don’t just make statements, back them up by showing the employer how you achieved your successes.
Objective statement, the winning formula:
- 4 lines max
- Includes the exact job title displayed in the job description
- Includes the objectives of the company
- Includes the skills identified from job description
- Includes years of your experience.
- Soft skills relevant for the role.
Careers Section:
In the ‘career’ section, under each job, preferably in bullet points, place the skills you acquired for example:
Web Designer
Skills:
- HTML
- CSS
- Photoshop
Achievements:
Use the STAR system to create a short sentence for each achievement.
For example, ‘{project}, with a deadline of 3 months to create {client} web site – completed in 1 month resulting in a bonus for the {company}.
Language:
Your CV is not the place for sloppy language.
Firstly, be concise – recruiters will receive hundreds of CVs in response to a single job application and as such, lengthy paragraphs will not be acceptable on your CV – make it short and snappy to really grab their attention, otherwise you’ll bore then to death and your CV will be screwed up, used as a makeshift basketball and get launched into the bin.
Secondly, use active verbs to get your point across i.e. completed rather than did.
Thirdly, don’t use ‘I’ or ‘we’ – the recruiter knows it’s you and repetition can get annoying. Always use third person. For example:
‘Awarded 2:1 BA (Hon’s) in Marketing. Three years Online Marketing experience. Specialising in social networking, has already made inroads by taking on own. Highly motivated to succeed in this industry. ‘
Examples of Power Words (action verbs):
Achieved Arranged Attended Assisted Co-ordinated Created Designed Developed Edited Established Helped Implemented Marketed Negotiated Supported Reorganised
Avoid ‘excellent communicator’ and other CV clichés:
This is the kind of general statement which everybody uses on their CV and is of no real use to you. Of course, these skills are very attractive to an employer but anyone can say they are an ‘excellent communicator’, what you need to do is prove your communication skills with a short statement underneath each job in you ‘careers section’ i.e. ‘effectively communicated with customers, colleagues and suppliers etc. Then, in your coving letter you can explain a little more- if it’s relevant. Remember the STAR system.
Keywords:
Will you be uploading your CV onto an online jobsite? Yes? Then you need to be aware of the basic keywords – your CV needs to be loaded with them in order for the search engine to see them. For example, if you hope to find a position as a copywriter key skills would be copywriter, editing, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) etc. Again, avoid generic statements such as ‘good communicator’ or ‘project management’ – these skills should be apparent from the descriptions in the ‘career section’. You should have about eight good skills, for example –‘HTML’, ‘C ++’, ‘Sage’ etc.
2) How to format your CV
How hard do you think it is to create a great CV? It really isn’t that hard. There’s nothing stopping you from easily creating a CV that will make recruiters notice you. If you are highly competent in word processing, creating a CV from scratch should be relatively simple. And keep it simple – overcomplicating your CV could be a disaster.
CV Templates:
There are many CV templates available online – beware, if you find a CV template in the public domain, you are not the only one using it. Either way, firstly, you must look at a variety of different CV’s to get an understanding as to what a good CV looks like and what would be most appropriate for your needs. Generally, the best CV’s are those which are original, created by the applicant. I must admit here, I previously used a CV template that I found online, which, I recently discovered, is common and outdated – be careful. It’s all about doing you research and seeing how other people do it first.
Visual CV – a new Solution:
A really easy way to build a CV and store it online is by using www.visualcv.com/. Here you can create a CV – no need for messing about as it formats your CV for you. You can then send recruiters the link to the online version or download a PDF version of your CV. You may have to convert your CV to .doc format – PDF converters can be found easily online.
Format, Structure and what to Include:
Your CV should be in .doc or PDF format – note it’s best to have both. Your CV should contain the following:
Joseph Any Guy – (Centre justify and bold your titles – rather than underline)
Heading Section: – add your address and telephone here. Keep this at the top of the document.
Objective Statement:
Objective statement – as above
Summary of Skills:
Summary of your skills – only keywords rather than long explanations – that’s what the covering letter is for. Remember, for each job you apply for you’ll want to change some of your skills keywords for those which are in the job description.
Qualifications:
Qualifications– list your all of your qualifications academic and vocational. Remember, qualifications gained from high school are irrelevant if you have a degree or higher qualifications.
Professional Qualification
List any vocational qualifications here
Career
As above.
Hobbies and Intersts
A short section on your hobbies and interests to help the employer find a little more about you as a person – not essential, if you other, have more important information you can leave this bit out. Note, your employer can see this on your social networking profiles. Yeah, they are going to Google you, so keep it clean.
If you are creating your own CV think content first rather than design, think about the headings and what information is appropriate. The overall design should be secondary.
3) Prove your skills
Are you creative? Are you applying for jobs where your creativity are skills required for the job? Even if you are not you should still have a blog or personal website to separate you from the competition.
Remember, the aim of a blog or website is to demonstrate you skills in an eye catching way– don’t get carried away – you can demonstrate the full extent of your skills in your portfolio.
Once your website is complete put a link to it on your CV.
4) Be truthful
Quite simply, don’t lie! Remember, a quick call to your referee’s and past employers, could catch you out. Besides, if you lie about skills in your CV your new employer will quickly discover you’ve embellished the facts and you could get fired.
5) Have different CV versions
Every job is different, you can’t just use one CV and expect it cover everything. For example, if you are applying for a number of different roles at the same time i.e. bar work alongside office admin different information will be relevant to the job. Furthermore, even if you are applying for a number of similar roles, different employers will particularly value specific and different attributes. It is important to have a CV master copy – edit and hone all the information before you start tailoring it for specific roles.
The easiest way to adapt your CV to each role is by reading the job description or advertisement and identifying which of your skills and experience would be more relevant. Next, tweak your CV leaving only the most relevant skills for that role – but don’t lie, adding false information to your CV is fraud.
6) Proof read your CV
Just one spelling, punctuation, grammar or formatting mistake will see your CV go from the big pile to the bin. Recruiters are constantly looking for ways to narrow down the pile of candidate’s CVs and spotting mistakes is the easiest way to do so. So always read, read, reread and double reread your application material. Get someone else to read and reread it too. You can also find free or affordable proofreading programmes available online.