I see lots of CVs every week, and five things regularly tend to let them down:
- The personal profile
- The layout
- The length
- The lack of narrative
- The cut-and-paste job
I do CV makeovers for job seekers, but if you want to do yours yourself, here’s how to make it stand out from everyone else’s.
- Re-think your personal profile
That paragraph right at the top of your CV, the little overview, is the hardest bit to write.
Let’s simplify it.
Think of this section as a few brief sentences that tell the reader who you are, what you have, and what you want.
Who you are: I’m a BCom Financial Accounting graduate, currently working for a small accounts firm in Randburg, as an Accounts Assistant.
What you have: I have three years’ experience working in practice since leaving school, gaining essential
skills, including preparation of accounts for small businesses, as well as VAT and tax returns.
What you want: I’m looking to find a new position with a larger practice that can support my continued progression – specifically by offering a SAIPA training contract. I have a particular interest in taxation and would also like the chance to get involved in more challenging personal tax work.
You can also throw in a few adjectives here – perhaps highlight a couple of your most important and relevant qualities. Just keep it concise – and avoid clichés.
Clichés to avoid
Let me save you some time and tell you that everyone includes these on their CV, and they no longer mean anything. Only use them if they’re really true (and important to your role), and you back them up and bring them to life with specific examples:
– I work well alone, and in a team
– I have great attention to detail
– I’m able to complete tasks to deadline
– I’m highly motivated/dedicated/hardworking
– I have excellent communication skills
– I’m organised
– I have a positive attitude
What to include instead
If you’re applying for a job, you’re up against lots of other similarly qualified people with similar experience to you. Your CV needs to show your individuality and what makes you better than the other applicants.
For example, let’s say you’re a Chartered Accountant. The prospective employer is rightly going to assume you can organise your time, spot errors, and communicate well with your colleagues. You dumb yourself down by referencing these skills.
Instead, talk about the aspects of accounting you most enjoy, how you’ve added value to clients, new processes you’ve implemented, and what you hope to achieve in the next few years of your career. Show the benefit you can bring to a new employer.
Your personal brand
You might have heard this term before – it’s gained a lot of popularity in the age of social media and with so many people producing content to put on the internet.
Your personal brand is how you market yourself, and it combines your personality, your skills, and your experience. Think of it as how you want to be known.
When you think of product marketing, particular brands aim to create a certain feeling about their products. For example, reliability, playfulness, fun, or innovation, depending on what the product is.
What do you want to be known for, and what’s special about your combination of experience, skills, and personality? Think about your most important personal and professional values as a starting point. How can you reflect those clearly through your CV?
My personal brand attributes, as a recruiter, are understanding, personable, approachable, trusted, transparent, flexible, reliable, and fair. You can see how the language and style of my website reflect these, and you can do the same with your CV. - Keep the layout clean
A prospective employer needs to be able to skim your CV and get a really good feel for your experience, and to do that, you need to keep it neat and structured.
– No need to include middle names or your date of birth – it looks dated and cluttered
– Trim excess space – use single line breaks between sections and jobs
– Use clear headings – all in the same style, in bold
– Use bold, capitalisation, or italics – pick your format. Are titles going to be all uppercase or bolded? Will
short summaries under positions be in italics? Be consistent and use formatting to make your content
more digestible.
– Put qualifications at the top – important stuff first. If you’re studying, make it clear which exams you’ve
passed and when you expect to qualify. First time passes? Great – say so!
– Don’t force the interests section – only include this if it gives a real insight into your personality or
personal achievements
– Use bullet points – it’s quicker to understand each of your roles if formatted this way - Keep the copy concise
Limit your CV to two pages to three at most.
If you’ve been in work for many years, or you’ve changed career paths, you needn’t give lots of detail under old, irrelevant jobs. Just keep the dates, the job title, and the company.
The longer your CV, the less information will be absorbed by the person reading it. Remember that initially, employers shortlist CVs by skim-reading them.
In other words, they don’t have time to read about your entire career in explicit detail, so you need to choose which information is most important to include. - Include a narrative
The main drawback of a CV is the fact that it doesn’t say everything, and you’re not going to be there when the employer reads it to give them more context.
You therefore need to pre-empt the sort of questions they might have about you, and try to weave this into your CV, as a brief narrative.
This isn’t always necessary, but circumstances like short stints with companies, regular moving around, career breaks, returning to an old employer, career changes – these are better off being explained.
Include a line underneath the relevant position that gives context. For example:
I accepted this local position after maternity leave, but found I didn’t enjoy working for such a small firm. I was approached by a former colleague with a new position, and I decided this was a better fit for me.
If not all of your positions have been full-time and permanent, make it clear which were part-time, which were contracts, and so forth. It shows complete transparency. - Tailor your CV
Finally, don’t be lazy about this. It’s so easy to see which CVs have been properly thought through and which are a standard template.
Don’t spend lots of time making your CV detailed, concise and intelligent, to let yourself down by not tailoring it to the position you’re applying for.
Here are ways you can tailor your CV:
– List your responsibilities in order of importance and relevance to the job you’re applying for (look at the
job description for reference)
– Reference aspects of the job or company that appeal to you in your personal profile – the what you want
part of this section that I talked about earlier
– Think of achievements that reflect the skills they’re looking for
– Use the same keywords they’ve used on the job description, where you can
– Don’t be afraid to mention skills you don’t have, but how you have other similar experience that would
transfer well (e.g., you haven’t line managed anyone, but you have mentored someone)
