What better way to start the new year full of potential prospects, paid work and continued recession than to update the CV? Probably loads of ways, however, that is how I’ve chosen to start mine due to sheer necessity.
I began the year by tearing up my old calendar planner and transferring information into a brand new red one. Quite satisfying actually. Sometimes nothing cheers me up as new stationary! There is something about the buying of new stationary as being supposedly conducive to organisation, as well as being brightly coloured with blank pages wiping out the old, used and useless ones.
Picture from here
When it comes to CV writing there is tonnes of information online, so there is little I can add here that will be anything revolutionary on the subject. However, with a couple of months of CV writing I have started to discern what works and what doesn’t work.
Tailor-made and proof-read
Rule number one that is a pretty well-known fact in UK CV writing is to always tailor your CV to the job description. The advice I’ve gotten is to simply use the verbs in the job description and mirror them directly in your CV. When the employer or HR person then scans it your CV will easily tick all their initial boxes. My partner have done some recruiting in his job and they tend to chuck all applications that they can tell have been made on a mass-production scale. So it seems worth spending the time to fashion a CV particularly for each job, or at least for each sector if you are looking across different ones.
The next thing to remember, which I have been a bit sloppy with, is to ALWAYS proof read it, preferably by someone else than yourself. I’ve swapped CVs with friends so we can help each other and possibly notice things that could be improved that we do not see ourselves.
There are all kinds of different ways of organising your CV and it is usually a matter of taste and convention in terms of what sector you’re applying for, what experience you have and what you want to accentuate. A careers adviser gave me a really good tip once where he showed me the a way to give the recruiter a ‘trailer’ to my CV so they could straight away see that my CV was relevant and worth reading. I usually call the header ‘personal profile’ and provide 3-4 bullet points with particularly relevant pieces of information about me that I believe will help me get an interview. And straight after I started using this I got two interviews in short succession!
Personal profile
- Graduate of University of Awesomeness
- Considerable experience in what your job entails
- Project management of something that is super relevant
- Training in that exact software your company uses
Obviously this trailer should actually reflect what will follow in the CV, but it is a nice way to underline what matters straight away and make the job easier for the recruiter to pick you for an interview!
Here are some CV buzzwords that can be helpful to get you started with the CV rewrite:
Task done?
accomplished
achieved
conducted
created
implemented
organized
performed
Solved a problem?
analyzed
corrected
debugged
decreased
diagnosed
overhauled
rescued
streamlined
Trained others?
coached
counseled
empowered
guided
instructed
taught
So the personal profile can work as a great trailer to what is to follow in the rest of the CV. As long as it isn’t like the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean 3 where the trailer looked it would be a huge pirate fleet bust-up at sea and the film turned out to be the slowest load of crap I’ve seen and we got so bored we had to walk out mid-way..
recession graduate 
