[Closed] CV advice

You should list your history to show no interruptions in your career, but previous roles can be just one liners in the CV, so company, time at company and role.

References are again up to the job you're going for, so just put them down as being available on request, references are a dying art these days due to so many issues with them, so no real need to do more than that line at the bottom of your CV.

If you're in the engineering world, then key achievements is a good one to focus on, nobody cares if you play golf or rides bikes, but they do care that you have a key achievement in their field, and can succinctly write it down in your CV, i.e. in a STAR format or the likes, where Situation and Task are simple, and the focus is on Action and Result, god i hated CVs where they provided key achievements which were all about the situation dnd task, with very little about the actual outcome or what they did!

Oh yeah, top tip, don't have a generic CV you send off, have a template that you can fit to the job you're applying for, focus on their requirements and cut or add to your template before submitting.

top tip, don’t have a generic CV you send off, have a template that you can fit to the job you’re applying for,

Agree on this. And pretty much paraphrase a job advert in your experience - if your experience fits (or you want to bullshit your way through). That's what they're looking for so be overt about demonstrating you've done it, don't leave subtleties for them to take inference from.

Don't bother listing references on your CV, it takes up valuable space. In my experience, the only reference will be contacting the HR department of previous employers to verify that you worked there when you said you did and that there were no disciplinary issues.

With previous employment, tail off the detail as you go back up to about 10 years then it should be where, from and too. Keep it to 2 pages if possible but not at the expense of relevance. 3 pages is more than acceptable if the content is relevant, 4 if you have had a particularly exotic and windswept career.

Good luck! It's a good time to be looking. The market is quite buoyant, especially in project and delivery management.

Some good points I'll echo having just done this.

Mine contains no references or mention of them. It's a given and you'll not get anything from a big company beyond dates worked.

Mine has limited personal details. Name, City (not address), email and phone, no DOB photo etc.

I have a personal statement at the top a few lines. Not stuff like "team player" that is pointlessly generic but specific to the job. So I'm my case a track record of new product development taking ideas from concept through scale up and customer trials to launch.

I have a full version that is long and contains lots of information. I cut out and change it depending on the role.

For example, I applied to a paint company and listed the chemistries I'd worked on as it is relevant. In other roles I think I just described them in a sentence as technology platforms.

There are plenty of good guides online. I went for the classic approach and wasn't brave enough to do a skills based one.

This emphasises what skills/experience you have and then lists jobs simply as company,time, job title. Often more useful if you have a long employment history.

I'd keep to two pages if you can, plus a cover letter. Experience over 10 years old is largely irrelevant in my opinion, but it is good to highlight how much experience you have. I usually break mine into the following sections:

1. Cover letter: Role you are applying for, why you are applying, what you can bring to them and how it would help you further your career. Sometimes these don't get read, but it's a good opportunity to expand a bit on 3. Also mention availability for interview etc. Keep it brief - third of a page at most.

2. Name, DoB, etc

3. Summary: 5-10 bullets on your experience (20 years PM'ing for example), capabilities, achievements, and goals. This needs to be strong as it is the bait to get them to read further. I haven't done any managing/hiring for a few years but rightly or wrongly would often discard a CV if I couldn't quickly see what value you would bring to me. In fact this was the bit that made me decide whether to interview them or not.

4. Job history/experience. Agree with above - keep it brief and taper off the detail the older the job. I've not heard of the STAR thing before but fully agree make it about outcomes, and if you can map those into outcomes for the business even better. Eg: Delivered project on time, within budget, enabling the business to bring <output> to market in time for <dependent activities such as marketing campaign/timing/xmas> and capturing xyz new customers/revenue.

5. Any relevant industry certification (PMI PMP, etc)

A CV is as long as it needs to be. Be concise, get to the point.

Talk about achievements rather than what your role was. "Landed a million pound contract" is better than "worked as part of a team in corporate sales." You could've been the tea boy in the latter case.

The further back you go, the less detail you need to give. I doubt our CEO's CV lists his student paper round and I doubt even less that anyone would care. My early jobs just give date, company and job title. Thinking about it that's broadly pointless anyway, aside from my directly previous employer none of the others I've ever worked for still exist. I could make up any old shit and no-one would know. In your case I might be tempted to write "2000-2005 various unrelated roles" unless there was something directly relevant to what you're doing.

Mine has limited personal details. Name, City (not address), email and phone, no DOB photo etc.

That's interesting. They're supposed to be able to prejudice based on age but, well, there's little to stop them. On the other hand, if you've added education details then it won't be hard to work out how old you are.

Why is address even on a CV? I suppose it's so that they can send you an acceptance letter, is this just a throwback to pre-Internet days?

Personal details like hobbies and interests is contentious, but the bottom line is that there is 'right' answer here. The right answer is whatever the recruiter wants to see so dig out your crystal balls. Personally I always liked to see it on candidate CVs, it added a bit of personality onto what is otherwise a D&D character sheet similar to 40 others they've seen that day.

At the end of the day, a CV is a sales pitch. Would you employ you? It's sole purpose is to get you an interview, after that it's done its job.

Oh and another, read the job adverts carefully, map them against the CV as well, remember there will be pass/fail criteria involved, if the advert contains pre-requisites, such as qualifications or experience, if that's not clear in your CV you will more than likely end up in the rejection pile.

Pay attention to the details, whatever is in the advert will usually be the scoring criteria for the sift, as stated, pre-requisites are the usual pass/fail part of a sift, then the scoring against the specification will occur, most job adverts aren't too difficult to work out what criteria they will score against if you read them properly.

It's not as hard as i'm making it sound, basically they have a shopping list of requirements contained within their job advert, and you are going to show how your skillset meets these requirements within your CV, as a PM this should be bread and butter for you ;o)

magic, thank you all

Two pages, with a focus on achievements rather than roles. I want to see what YOU did as part of those achievements. Can run in log time, so 10 to 5 years ago, 5 to 1 year ago and last 12 months. Address what you have done to what you are applying for. Recruiters are all lazy, don't make them have to think - spell it out for them that you have what they are looking for and have already shown you can deliver it.

If you are on LinkedIn, add a link to that in the header with your Email.

References aren't taken these days save to confirm that you have worked where you say you did.

The most senior people I know on linkedin just put a block of text, it's more a narrative of what they are looking for. I suppose once you 've had a senior position the job speaks for itself. As a counter to this, some of the biggest b...itters I ever met claimed some v spurious successes, tbh it was a complete fabrication of the truth.

Or maybe thats just linkedin, sorry no idea 're cvs I 've been out of it for ages.

Good luck in the search though.

Personal details like hobbies and interests is contentious, but the bottom line is that there is ‘right’ answer here. The right answer is whatever the recruiter wants to see so dig out your crystal balls. Personally I always liked to see it on candidate CVs, it added a bit of personality onto what is otherwise a D&D character sheet similar to 40 others they’ve seen that day.

It really can't do any harm unless you have nothing to say. "I like watching TV and drinking wine" might not be helpful! However if you can add something that either shows personality, gives a point to talk about at interview or where there might be transferrable skills then definitely put it on there. I've interviewed people for tech/software jobs where their experience coaching kids football or running ultra-marathons was the thing which made those candidates stand out over the others who had similar tech backgrounds.

still the two sides of a4 using a readable font?

I see all sorts. I don't think there is a rule. The most impressive ones are always the shorter ones - I suspect because they've tailored to sound like a perfect fit and binned the rest of the irrelevant stuff or at least I don't have to hunt for it. In my opinion the top half of the first page is what matters (so don't waste 1/2 that with your personal details which tell me nothing). Modern CV skimming is electronic - so you need to persuade me that I should scroll beyond what's on my screen. I often wonder why people have even used a second page.

It really can’t do any harm unless you have nothing to say. “I like watching TV and drinking wine” might not be helpful!

"I like socialising with friends..." so you get pissed every night, gotcha.

"I like quiet nights in, and walks in the countryside..." mate, it's a CV, not a dating profile.

I’ve interviewed people for tech/software jobs where their experience coaching kids football or running ultra-marathons was the thing which made those candidates stand out over the others who had similar tech backgrounds.

I think it makes them more memorable too, but maybe that's just me.
"What did you think of Billy?"
"Billy... Billy... which one was... oh, yes, the cricketer!"

Plus, you can add job-relevant skills by stealth here. I'm into escape rooms. Nothing to do with my job in security except - it's everything to do with my job, it's literally a physical pen-test! Plus problem solving, code-breaking, working as a team, communication...

And another, bit of an add on to earlier, do a bit of research if you can on the company you're going for as to how they manage HR and hiring, a lot of large companies use external agencies to sift and vet, and if this is a known, they tend to have a lot of keyword searches in the CVs and assessments against the key areas of the advert, as stated earlier.

If it's a smaller company, or even some medium sized ones, they may have a more internal route for sifting and assessing, which can mean tweaking the CV a little more at that level of assessor.

Basically, put a little effort in and do your homework on applications, the advert will give a bit away, who is the contact point for further information, is it joebloggs@thecompany, or is it joannebloggs@hiringsolutions, is there a contact in the company to get further details, is there something you can use in the advert to use as an excuse to call to gauge the feel of the focal point for this campaign and so on, just use every trick you can to do your best for getting the job, or at least to interview.

I would say take care about over matching what you write to what is being sought.  I like to see that someone has read the requirements as tailored their response to match.it shows they are serious rather than just shooting out their cv to everyone. However some people overdo it so they are excellent at everything we are looking for so they look like bullshitters.  Somewhere in the middle is good

I like hobbies as they can give something general to chat about to put people at ease and get an idea of what sort of person they are.