CV Tips & Advice - How To Write A CV

It's vital that when YOUR CV hits the recruitment agencies' desk, or the screen of that important HR contact, that it makes an impression, and how!

For busy employers and executives who may skim, scan, and filter tens if not hundreds of job seekers CV's a day, how can you make sure YOURS is the one that gets put in the right tray, as opposed to the trash?

Well, the devil is in the detail, but not the detail you may think.

Whilst other websites might recommend a plethora of crazy ways to make sure your resume grabs attention, many of these methods are not necessarily attention grabbers for the right reasons.

When writing your new CV, your focus should be on the content, how you phrase it and what order you place it in.

Statistics tell us that we have a mere few seconds to garner a recruiters interest as they skim our CV, and I mean skim, because very few have the time to actually read each and every one of them before an initial filtering stage.

Here are the FUNDAMENTAL elements of how to write a CV that you need to pay attention to:

Particulars: Full name followed by address, email, birth date (only if you wish), work visa (if required) or passport details (if required).

Profile: the profile or “Relevant Accomplishments” is an opportunity for you to sell yourself. Preparing this part of your CV needs to be done with care. Essentially you are drawing on your Experience, but you should try to frame it in a slightly more creative way.

Writing your profile should obey the same basic rules as your Experience:

• Think: Specific - Targeted - Relevant – Short
• You should find that one or two sentences can neatly wrap everything together. Try to think What, How Long or How Much. Eg. Over Five years as a ‘XXX’ with recent XXX XXXX experience in a successful growing medium size practice.

Education: Almost all positions require you to highlight your highest level of education. Memberships to professional bodies and certifications may also appear in this section but ensure they are highly relevant to the job to which you are applying.

Experience: Now is your chance to start to look at the whole resume and view it from your readers’ perspective.

• ASK YOURSELF: Does this CV clearly and quickly enable a bleary eyed, worn-out, speed-reading reader to CLEARLY SEE me as the person who is the answer to their workload, their recruitment problems?

References: Include the names and contact details of three references – at least two should be previous managers or supervisors.