CV Tips – Making Your CV Work

Whether you’re looking for a part-time job to support your studies or are trying to pin down the dream job that will lead to a great career, one of the first things you’ll need to do is to prepare a CV. With the right CV tips and enough effort, you can vastly increase your chances of getting to the interview stage with your job application.Get to the point.

Employers see thousands of CVs and will have honed their methods for weeding out undesirable ones at a glance; one of these methods is to judge by the size of the document. As a rule of thumb, your CV should be no longer than two A4 pages, so ‘waffling’ is not an option.

Make sure it’s up-to-date

It’s no good having a marvelous CV if it doesn’t reflect your most recent experience and achievements. Even if you are given an interview on the basis of the information you have provided, a prospective employer may wonder why you hadn’t taken the time to make sure the CV was current if you then refer to something you hadn’t included in your application. This is one of those simple CV tips that takes very little time but ensures that you present a complete picture of yourself to the company.

Keep it relevant

It can be tempting to put every qualification and piece of experience you have on your CV and to send a copy of it to every employer you’d like to work for. However, one of the most important CV tips you can follow is to focus each version you produce on a specific job. Investigate the company and the role you want before highlighting the qualifications and experience you have that would be of value under those particular circumstances.

Presentation counts

If an employer must read through CV after CV, they will appreciate a format that makes it easy to understand. Use headings, bullet points and spacing to good effect to allow the reader to do a certain amount of scanning for the information they particularly want to see. A clear font in a reasonable size will be appreciated far more than if you shrink your text in order to be able to cram in a few extra sentences.

Check, check and check again

There is very little more likely to make someone discard your application than incorrect spellings and grammar. Luckily, you can employ a number of safeguards, such as using a spellchecker, to make sure you find any errors. It’s a good idea to leave your CV for a few hours or overnight before doing a final check on it; during the first few hours, it’s easy to see what you meant to write rather than what you actually wrote.

Make a statement

Even if you carefully follow the CV tips advising you to keep your information concise and to tailor it to the specific job, it’s still a good idea to add a personal statement. Although this must be very short, you can use it to point out those attributes you possess that would be an asset in the position for which you are applying. You should think of it as an answer to the inevitable question “Why should we give you the job?”

While it’s impossible to guarantee that a good CV will get you a job, it’s certainly the case that a bad one will stop you from getting one. With such easy CV tips to follow, there’s now no reason to take that chance.

 

If you are looking for a job visit our Career Advice section & Recruitment News for lots of helpful tips.

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