Your CV is effectively your opportunity to sell yourself to an employer. The same rules apply to selling yourself in your CV as apply elsewhere in life.
Question: What makes us buy one roughly similar product over another ?
Answer: How effectively that product has been sold to us.
Question: Do the best candidates always get called to interview or get offered jobs?
Answer: No - those most effective at selling themselves succeed.
So what constitutes effective selling in your CV?
The first step in selling yourself involves eliminating all negative words or content from your CV. Whilst the truth may be that you left your last job because you became frustrated with your pay or the office politics or your boss’s attitude, your new employer does not want to know about this. Learn to focus only on the positive aspects of your experience and the achievements you accomplished. Never make criticisms of your former employers. Once you are well established in a job you can choose to reveal the bigger picture of your previous jobs should you have colleagues you can trust. Whilst you are writing your CV, however, you must come across as universally positive about your past work.
Be careful not to let your positivity turn into boasting. If you are too boastful or exaggerated, people will find your CV irritating and unconvincing. On the other hand if you are too self-effacing and timid, you will make no impact or provoke a negative, critical response. You must learn to strike a balance between under-selling and over-selling yourself.
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Writing a CV - Sell Yourself!
CV Writing - Optional Elements Part 2
Personal Details
Which personal details, beyond your full name, should be included in your CV? Traditionally, both your date of birth and marital status were included in a CV. Today, however, whilst a reference to your date of birth is still expected, it is not – in the UK, Europe and North America - considered necessary to reveal your marital status.
Before you decide whether to reveal your marital status you should ask yourself how the recruiter will consider this information, if at all. If you believe the recruiter will see no relevance in it, do not bother to include it. If you are sure the nature of the job you are applying for is more suitable for someone single or married, include that information if it works in your favour.
For example, if or you suspect a recruiter is looking for someone he can expect to devote at least several years to a job, revealing that you are married with two kids at school may positively influence your application. For the recruiter you are statistically a better hire than a young singleton. On the other hand, if you know a job will involve a lot of travel and time away, a recruiter may be interested to hear that you are single and have no particular ties. In this case a singleton is statistically a better hire.
Gauging how an employer will consider your marital information is a tricky business. For that reason it is usually preferable to omit this information entirely. The earlier sections of your CV – profile, skills, employment, education – should be so well presented that the recruiter makes his decision to progress your application without having to consider anything else.
CV Writing - Education
The amount of focus you put on the Education Section of your CV very much depends on where you are in your career.
For instance, if you are fresh out of college, your education constitutes the bulk of your experience. Since that is the case you should consider whether you might be better off using a functional CV format instead of the traditional chronological CV approach.
In a functional CV you present skills or competencies at the beginning of the CV, preceding or following this with a list of your educational qualifications. The skills you present can be ones mostly developed from your education rather than ones mostly acquired in the workplace. The important thing are the skills themselves and the good first impression they make, rather than where these skills were acquired.
For those with little work experience but considerable education this represents a distinct advantage over the chronological CV where your work experience - or rather lack of it - is presented prominently almost inevitably on the first page.
If you have considerable work experience, the educational Section of your CV usually becomes less important as time goes by. That is certainly the case if you haven't undertaken any formal education since your left college or university. In these circumstances your educational section should follow your employment section and not the other way round.
The layout of your CV section should follow the following format:
1. Dates Attended
2. Name and location of school, college, university
3. Level of study/Qualification
4. Subjects
5. Grade
We think it is a good idea to list any professional qualifications and training in a separate section to your academic education and schooling. Create an entry entitled 'Professional Qualifications & Training' and have this follow your Employment History section and precede your regular Education Section. (Alternatively, you could append these entries to the relevant job in the employment section of your CV)
For instance, a sample entry might look like this:
***************************************************************
Professional Qualifications and Training
2005 ABC Training, London
Prince 2 Practitioner Qualification (Passed)
2004 ABC Training Ltd, London
Course: Project Management Fundamentals
Education
2001-2004 University of Bath, England
BA (Hons) Business Administration, 2:1
1999-2001 St. Stephen's School, Sudbury, England
A Levels:
Business Studies (A)
Law (B)
German (C)
*****************************************************************
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CV Writing Basics
So you'd like to move on and change your job?
Or, maybe you're fresh out of college and new to the job market entirely?
Think you can just get by borrowing a friend's CV and doing a sneaky cut-and-paste job with your details ?
"Surely not!"
CV writing is an art. CV writing is a science. CV writing isn't as easy as you think.
Then again - it's not rocket science.
There are, however, certain rules, traditions and tested techniques to learn and employ when putting together a CV. Writing a successful CV takes a great deal of time (unless you get a cv writing service to do it for you.) So, if you're going to spend all that time researching and writing, you should prepare yourself properly and get to grips with a few ground rules.
There are many different styles of CV - the chronological CV, the functional CV, the hybrid CV, the skills-based CV, the structured interview CV, the skills-based CV....
(I could go on. But for your sake I won't.)
All of these differing CV formats, very different though some of them appear, share certain standard features which you should always include. Not only should these elements always be included, they should always be included in a particular way.
CV Structure (Part 1) - Name, Address, Contact Details
Your name should always appear at the very head of your CV and always in a text size larger than any other font size employed elsewhere on your CV. From a stylistic point of view, aligning your name to the left or centre works best. This is not because right-aligning your name on the page looks wrong in any absolute way, just that recruiters are usually conservative in terms of what they expect to encounter on a CV.
The name you give on your CV should be the one you use normally, as opposed to your full formal name (unless your full formal corresponds to what you normally use). For example, if your full formal name is Alexander James Charles Smith, but you refer to yourself normally as Alex Smith, then you should use the latter name. Don't refer to yourself as Mr, Mrs, Ms or similar. The only instance when this would be acceptable is when your name makes it ambiguous what your gender is. Even then you should place brackets around the Mr or Ms or Mrs bit. Better still just add a one line entry in your personal information section - i.e.
Gender: Female
The only other titles you may want to include are professional titles such as Dr. or Professor. This kind of title may be placed before the name.
One last thing on titles - only consider using them where you are sure that doing so will be to your advantage. If you have a PhD but you're trying to line up a job in a call centre (for whatever reason) you'd be better advised not to head up you CV with the Dr. abbrevation before your name.
Addresses
Whilst it is not set in stone anywhere (I don't believe there are a Ten Commandments of CV Writing - but maybe there should be) including your address immediately beneath your name at the head of your CV is a good idea. Like this:
It's important that all elements of your CV are immediately identifiable and that includes your contact details. The norm is to present these on the first page and consequently recruiters will naturally look there to find them. It may appear a trivial matter, but a stressed out recruiter with a position to fill and a sack load of CVs to analyse, may well become riled by something as banal as not being able to immediately find your email address.
These days a recruiter may not ever make use of your full postal address, contacting you only by email or by 'phone. Nonetheless, don't make assumptions - not every employer is the same and if they do want to post candidates invitations to interview or further information, they'll be baffled by the absence of an address. So much so that they will probably discard your CV. You must therefore include a full postal address.
After all - they'll need somewhere to send the contract once you land the job, right?
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