Everyone knows that their CV is important when looking for jobs as it is your first opportunity to impress your potential employer by allowing them to see you are suitable for a role.
But not many people don’t know that employers can take only around eight seconds to scan a CV and work out whether to keep it or not. So this means you have to know how to make your CV stand out and make the cut.
1. Stick to the point
Keeping your CV concise allows recruiters who are faced with many documents at a time, a clear representation of your experience and qualifications. Your CV is your foot in the door and only the first step of the recruitment process. A good guideline for a length of a CV is around 2 sides of A4 paper, you want to keep some things to the interview.
2. Target it to the opportunity
Different job opportunities will mean recruiters will be looking for different qualities, so you should tailor your CV to each role. You can tell a lot about a business from some quick research on the internet and looking at the ad they placed. When writing about your skills and experience, you should bear the requirements of the role in mind.
3. Plug the gaps
Recruiters tend not to like seeing big gaps on CVs as they have no idea what you were up to during these periods. You might have gained some transferable skills during your time off that you can mention. The best way to do this is by updating your CV regularly, so you can keep track of skills you may gain while out of employment.
4. Make it error free
In the Finance Recruitment world and other high interest sectors, recruiters will be looking for easy ways to cut down the weaker applicants and one easy way to do that is to look for errors. Simple things like spelling and grammar, should be picked up by your computers spell checker, but getting a few people to read over it will make sure it all makes sense and is error free.
5. Be truthful
It is quite common for applicants to exaggerate or lie on applications and CVs and this maybe easy to get away with if you are applying for a fast food job. But in International recruitment situations or high responsibility roles, recruiters will be a lot more thorough when checking qualifications and claims made on your CV. The best advice is to not lie at all as it could be very embarrassing when you are caught out.
