Principles:
Neatness and
appearance
Ensure that your CV
is word-processed, single sided, on good quality white or cream paper. Ideally two,
maximum 3 pages.
Make the document easy on the eye, with plenty of white space, regular spacing, constant
margins and tabbing.
Research shows that CV’s are easiest to read if in 11 or 12 pt, Times New Roman or
Arial script. Emphasis should be gained through emboldening or capitals rather than
underlining or italicising.
Resist the temptation to add a photograph or to get carried away with fancy binders, use
of graphics and colour etc. These CAN have a negative impact.
Targeting
Once you have
produced your CV, you may well never send it out twice in the same form. You should always
look at the job advert (or at what you know about the company and the job if no advert)
and fine-tune the CV each time to match the requirement. Primarily this will be in the
areas of key skills to be highlighted. Don’t forget to keep a copy of each variant,
so that you arrive at interview with the same script as the interviewer!!!
Be Honest.
It is easy to gild
the lily on paper, but very difficult to sustain the untruth when face to face with the
interviewer, so do not dig a hole for yourself with the CV. Only make claims for your past
performance or experience that can be substantiated.
No gaps.
Hiring managers tend
to get suspicious if there is a gap in the dates on your career history and may make
assumptions about what you were up to. If you have taken time out for sabbatical,
maternity/child rearing, travel or health reasons then say so. As I shall explain later,
however, a gap left at the start of the career – in other words only listing our jobs
from 1986 instead of 1976 is not being dishonest (“earlier jobs too long ago to be
relevant!”) and can be used as part of the “age concealing” process.
Positive
Present yourself in a
very positive way, bring out what you have done in terms of your transferable skills,
strengths, achievements and experience rather than majoring just on your responsibilities.
Ask yourself how your previous employers have benefited from having you around. Use action
verbs to describe your previous roles - taught, negotiated, managed, developed etc rather
than assisted, coordinated, liaised, which give no clear sense of accountability.
Structure
Most CVs will
contain the same elements of information, but there are options as to how these are
structured.
The elements –
to be looked at in detail shortly – will include:
Contact details
Personal profile
Career history
Achievements
Key skills
Personal details such as date of birth (!!!), education, qualifications, interests
I would suggest that,
in most cases, the first two sections on the document will be the (name and) contact
details and the personal profile. It does make sense to put your address etc at the top to
aid the recipients’ admin task, and it certainly makes sense to have the profile, if
you have one, at the beginning to give an instant view of yourself and cause the reader to
want to read further to find out more.
The area with scope
for variation in structure is that around skills/achievements/history. Three versions of
my own CV are attached to demonstrate three possibilities.
Firstly, the functional CV. This defines your past in
functional areas, in each case giving a function header (project management, marketing,
management, design) and then, under each, spelling out some of the key achievements and
skills demonstrated in that function. The actual job history, which follows, is a brief
one since most of the “selling” detail has appeared within the function.
This approach is
often appropriate for those who have a multi-functional background who wish to market
themselves for some or all of the functions.
Secondly, the historical CV. This is structured around the
career history as its major element, showing appropriate skills and achievements within
the context of each job role. May be a better approach for those who have relatively
mono-functional careers, spending most of their time progressing through the levels of eg
marketing, finance, development.
Lastly, a hybrid CV. Spells out the transferable
skills and achievements as discrete lists and then career history in brief form.
Educational and
personal details, which probably have relatively little impact when we are 50+ and sell
ourselves on our experience, can follow at the end.
There are many other
models and ways of cutting the cake of our backgrounds, and you may wish to use a variant
rather than a direct match to one of these three. That’s fine – it’s your
CV!
Content
The guidelines that
follow are sequenced as per the “hybrid model” referred to above, but the effect
is the same whichever you are following.
Note that there is no
need to have the words Curriculum Vitae at the top. It is obvious what the document is and
you could easily cause your first in-the-bin-inducing spelling error!
Contact details. It makes sense to have your
name in bold larger script top centre. The usual form of your name will suffice (Don Wilde
rather than Donald James Wilde B Sc, MICPD). Address and numbers may well also be centred,
or may be at left and right. Include full contact details, including mobile phone and
e-mail, since recruiters/agencies often wish to contact candidates in a hurry. If you do
not have either mobile or e-mail, particularly the latter, then think of getting them as
they may considerably improve your campaign effectiveness.
Profile or Personal Profile. This is key since
it determines, in many cases, whether the rest of the document gets read at all. Probably
no more than two sentences, one describing your 2/3 key experience areas, the other
perhaps 3/4 key skills. This is one section that you need to look at closely each time you
send it out and tune to the particular application. It helps to give impact if the profile
is emboldened and, maybe, cut in by 1 cm either side. Rather like a sales call, if you do
not grab the attention in this first half page you may be sunk.
Incidentally, do be
aware that it is generally considered that the profile section, indeed all sections,
should be written in the indirect third person to make it sound more objective. So do not
use “Don is …..” or “I am ….” but words in the form “An
experienced project manager ……”. The profile should also stick to what is
rather than what you want to be, and should not refer to your ambitions/aspirations for
the future, or even your next job.
Key Skills. Whether as a discrete list, or
addressed within functions or career history, you must be able to identify some key
transferable skills. Some will be functional (eg project planning, double-entry
book-keeping, remuneration analysis, application software development) whilst others will
be generic, often mainly behavioural, of which examples include analysis, communication,
integrity, planning and organising, sensitivity to others. Include any PC skills,
particularly in the area of Microsoft Office. IT professionals will clearly need to
present a considerable list, probably a good half page, to cover all the detail. Again
this skills area is one to be tuned each time you use the CV.
Achievements. Most of us can look back over our
careers and identify jobs/projects/tasks that they have done well, perhaps been rewarded
specifically for, or have taken a major chunk of time, or given rise to particular pride.
Spell them out, briefly, particularly if of any relevance to the targeted job. Always,
always, always include measures if you can (eg £xxM profit, 50 staff, sales increased
50%, two weeks inside target timescale).
Career History. This is likely to be a discrete
section, whatever your model, although varying in detail level. Some suggestions:
always go in reverse
date order (ie most recent job first) unless there is good reason for not doing so
(possible if earlier jobs in your career are most relevant to the one sought)
express dates in
years (1998 – 2003) rather than months. If nothing else, this might help to hide how
long you have been out of a job!
give job title and
company name, but other specifics such as company address, manager’s name are
unnecessary. It is often useful, particularly with recent or relevant jobs, to put a
sentence about the company (product and size) to help scope.
use action verbs, as
mentioned earlier, when describing jobs. Include achievements and skills used if these
have not been covered in separate sections
remember that you do
not need to go into great detail about your duties unless you are trying to fill two
pages!
go back, with no
gaps, as far as you think it to be relevant. You may, for example, choose to list each
position (with decreasing detail?) back to 1987, then to have an entry that says
“1980-1987, various junior finance roles in retail” and to stop there even
though you have been working since 1969. Only tell them what is appropriate to your
application.
Personal Details. Some additional items of
detail that you may wish to include, either under one blanket heading or separately.
Date of Birth (never
age). In my book there is no reason why we should declare this, unless applying for a role
where we feel that being 50+ enhances our chances. Even though there is much less age
discrimination these days, and it is not only B&Q that invites retirees, it has certainly not disappeared completely.
Education. Is this
likely to make a difference when in our fifties or sixties? Not very, but there are some employers who are very degree conscious, so I would encourage graduates to mention the
fact, but not to detail all the O and A levels that led up to then. Those with other
qualifications may well put them down, at least the highest level, but if you have none or
“just 3 O levels” then just do not mention education at all.
Professional
Qualifications. Please do not list every training course that you have ever attended, but
if you have occupational or professional achievements to be shown off to aid your chances
then do so. Similarly if you have done training courses that cover areas outside your
experience field (eg a language) should be included if you think it relevant.
Interests. In brief,
please, but do mention them (or some of them). Whilst your hobbies will only occasionally
aid your ability to make the interview list, many interviewers like to take a lead from
here when making the open, warm , rapport-building conversation as you walk through the
door. Hence “I see you like travel – where have you visited recently?” or
“You say you are a snooker player – did you watch the Nationals last week?”
will, they hope, help you to feel more relaxed before diving into deep interview mode. |
