How To Construct A CV – And Secure The First Interview: Part 1

Part 1: Overall Impression.

The Daily Mail had an article last week ‘revealing’ that currently a third of Britons want to change careers. Now, whether you believe this press release from Chrysalis Courses, (training courses for careers in hypnotherapy, psychotherapy and counselling…) to be a piece of in-depth, rigorous cross-sector research or not, the PR market certainly is buoyant right now. Lots of people who stayed put during the recession are dusting off their CVs and making enquiries. Great news for me, good news for the economy.



When I interview candidates, they nearly always ask me for suggestions to improve CVs. CV writing is an art, and there’s certainly more to it than can be covered in a single article. So how about three?



In this first piece, I’m going to give you a few tips about the overall impression of the CV – format size, font etc. Then in a further two articles, we’ll look at how the content comes together, what to include and what not to include.



But bear in mind that there is no such thing as the perfect CV. There are various ways to approach it, which work for different reasons for different clients. Your CV will ideally be tailored by a good recruiter to suit each client, as each client will naturally be looking for different things. What should also be noted is that CVs in direct application to a job and CVs from recruiters are received by clients in slightly different ways, with different expectations before they are even opened. So you might want to have two versions for your CV. The guide below is for submitting a CV via a recruiter.



Overall Impression

1. Two Pages Good: Your CV serves as your first impression. But it also gets read very quickly. Most MDs will scan-read the CVs that land on their desks (due to volume). They’ll be looking for experience that matches the brief, so this needs to shout from the page. It’s also the reason that your CV needs to be two pages. A third page will never get read. Be concise, be relevant, make every word count. Just like a press release, the first couple of paragraphs need to seal the deal (which in this case, is securing the first interview) – so those paragraphs need to be relevant experience and results.



2. Keep It Simple: For similar reasons, your CV must scan-read easily. You can’t fight it, so at least make it easier for the MD to scan-read, they’ll appreciate it. Don’t clutter it up, don’t put in photos or fancy pictures – black and white and straight forward is best. Even is you’re going for a ‘creative’ role, let the experience speak for itself, don’t try and push this through fancy design. Any pictures are irrelevant and a waste of space, save them for your coverage book. This is PR after all – you’re demonstrating your skill at delivering a concise, targeted message.



3. Word Document: Pdf does look professional, but have a Word copy too. Your recruiter may need to make tweaks to the CV at the last minute – impossible with a read-only pdf, and copy/paste does not work well between the programmes.



4. Fonts: Use the same font throughout, with maybe one or two size variations for headings and sub-headings and make use of bold, underline and italic to differentiate sections (but again, keep it simple, and don’t go over the top, make sure it still flows). Use normal bullet points, not fancy ones. Not only is this unnecessary decoration, it may not load on some computers. Use a smart, easy to read font. As a tip, Tahoma and Verdana are the only fonts guaranteed to display properly on both PC and Mac. Just remember, if your CV is hard to open, the client may not bother trying. Sans serif fonts are a good idea, otherwise it can look a little too formal – but that is a personal choice.

Now those are the basics covered, in the next post we’ll look at deciding how to structure the content on the CV – how to catch attention and also make the information flow well throughout. In the third post, we’ll look at the finer details of content. Keep watching this space…