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What Is A CV ?
A Curriculum Vitae (CV) is a document
outlining your skills, experience, education,
qualifications, employment history and achievements.
A CV is
an advertisement outlining your
best skills and
accomplishments as they relate to the specific company
and position.
The purpose of
the
CV is to show your potential and make you
sound attractive, interesting and worth considering to
the company,
and therefore receive a job interview. An employer or
recruitment company will have many enquiries about a
single job and only a few people who appear suitable for
interviewing
will be chosen to move to the next stage.
Your CV must
therefore
be as good as you can make it.
A CV presents all your key
qualifications, skills and experience in a
well-presented, easy-to-read format. Your prospective
employer should be able to obtain all the information
they are looking for about a prospective employee.
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This
includes your education
and work background, whether you have any relevant
experience and what you have achieved during education
and through any work placements/jobs.
Everyone from a student just starting
employment, to a Managing Director of a multinational
firm will need a good CV, and this is generally where
things become difficult. Very few people, even senior
executives, can write a good CV naturally and it is
something that takes a lot of time and attention.
Remember that it will be the only
information they will see about you before they get
the chance to meet you. You should thus get the
employer’s attention within the first 10 seconds. The
first glance is the most important as this when the
decision is made to either chuck the CV in the dustbin,
or to place it on the pile for further examination.
Don’t waste paper space by including all your personal
and irrelevant information on the first page. This page
should be reserved for the most important information.
An Employer's Perspective
Like an application form - the
CV is a good way of
sorting the wood from the trees. Employers receive
hundreds of CV's, sometimes alongside an application
form, sometimes not.
At this stage
CVs
may be
scrutinized
to filter out those who don't fit the
job profile
e.g. age, experience or qualifications, or sloppy and
poorly presented CVs,
or the too long ones. To avoid
discrimination based on age, sex, religion or race,
avoid the inclusion of information that will give the
above information away.
An employer will know what they are
looking for. They normally
stipulate the requirements and provide a profile of the
ideal candidate in the job advertisement. They
will scan the CVs to look
for these particular aspects. To ensure that your CV gets more
than one glance, make sure that your skills,
accomplishments, work history, education and interests
are presented in such a way that the relevancy to the
job advert can be seen with the first glance. Avoid
writing long paragraphs. It is not an essay. You should
keep readability in mind.
The next step, more than likely, is that
someone more senior will take
an in-depth
look (and maybe read your
entire
CV) and decide who
is
interesting,
who has the potential to
slot into a team role potentially, etc.
At this stage an employer will compare
the outline of the job, experience and personal
qualities required, with what they can see on the CV. It
is vital that this information is easy to
find and not lost within
too much text. So it is important to make the first
section of your CV short and snappy
through the use of bulleted
points to show your
key skills as
related to
the specific job.
Through the inclusion of an objectives
section at the top of your CV, you can accomplish this.
This is where you show that your goals, personality and
skills are compatible with the company’s goals and
culture.
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