Your CV is your personal advertisement

The primary objective of your CV is to gain an interview either with a potential employer or a recruitment consultant and to create the best impression about you in their mind before you meet. Your goal is to get that job! Some advertisements have significant response levels - in some cases as many as 200-300 - so you should understand that the initial review of your CV will probably not last any longer than 2-3 minutes. It is vital that it makes a positive impression. It needs to be easy to read, in a professional, business-like style and focus on key achievements. Be clear about not just what you have done but also be industry specific – we have seen hundreds of CV’s for example for Sales Managers – they all explain their key skills, their sales ability etc but many of them forget to describe the type of business they worked for!

Layout

Presentation certainly matters. If you have no or little desktop skills then get some help from someone who can layout a document. Some word-processing packages can auto-format a document; others have standard CV layouts incorporated as templates. Use them if necessary.

Contact Information

Your CV should have your name and address, and at least one contact number where you can be reached during working hours (this is really important). A mobile number is the most useful. Place these details at the beginning. Include everything that might help us to contact you quickly. Believe it or not, about 1 in 20 applicants fail to include contact details in their CV, They apply for a job and then disappear into a black hole. Weeks later, we get aggrieved phone calls from the applicant demanding to know why they were never contacted. This is particularly true of emailed CV’s

Personal Information

It is up to your own discretion as to what other personal information you provide - if it is of no real importance to anyone else then it is probably better left out.

Skills

What are your qualifications? List them in rank order or chronological order, it doesn't matter - but do give dates. What really matters is that you actually hold them. If you hold a qualification you should have appropriate certification to support it. At some point in the process you will be asked to support your claims if a qualification is a specified requirement for the job.

Experience

In the end, the client will want to see a concise record of your experiences, skills and achievements. List your jobs in chronological order. The accepted (and expected) practice is to list the most recent first. If there are gaps in your working life, list them and explain if necessary. It is not unusual to have travelled around the world or spent several years running a bar in Bali.

Summarise each job by describing the role, responsibilities and achievements. Refer to any hardware, software, languages, etc. that were used. Be concise - detailed accounts can come out in the interview.

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