1 Have a Clean and Clear Layout



A good CV is always well laid out, plenty of ?white space? in the same font, without photo, without fancy text boxes.

2 No Mistakes!

The most likely cause of your CV being put in the WPB is poor grammar and spelling. Don't just rely on your spell checker, (e.g. Manger is spell checked as a word, but didn't you want to say Manager?) really read it after you have written it and have someone else read it before you publish!? Also make sure you have the right contact numbers on your CV to make it easy for the employer or recruitment consultant to call you. Have a professional and easy to type email contact, preferably not a free email address as it looks so unprofessional e.g. not bunnyrabbitt@hotmail.com.

3 Focus Your CV

Concentrate on the most recent, most senior and most complex functions in your employment history. Don't waste space on minor skills and repetitions from the distant past.

4 Project a good timeline

Your CV is about what you have to offer in the future; you only use your past record to justify your claims to having valuable assets. Summarise the early stuff in your career and focus attention on whatever most powerfully justifies you in the role of candidate. Leave the job detail and your wonderful personality to the interview; leave your objectives and demands till they offer you the job.

5. Focus on assets

Don't worry about the functional, the skill-based, the chronological and all the other versions of CV people talk about. Your mission is to find an effective way to showcase whatever assets you have that make you a strong candidate: this can be knowledge, experience, results, opinions about your performance, aspects of your vision, character or working methods.

6 Be positive in a professional way

Crazy claims and arrogance do not sit well with experienced recruiters who know enough about life to make up their own minds; the perfect tone to hit with your CV would be to make it sound like one experienced recruiter reporting to another. This means that it has the look and feel of comments about you, not claims by you. If you hit that tone you make a more authentic impression on the reader's conscious and unconscious awareness.

7 The subtle results that really measure you

It's great if your CV can shout success like 'planned new sales initiative that achieved 150% of target and led to adoption of methods by centers across the organization?" But not everyone will have such visible results, especially during an economic downturn. No need for despair: you can highlight all sorts of less obvious achievements when you describe your recent jobs and roles within each job; how about these to get you going:

"?saved the company over 10% on its most important supply contracts through a planned process of inventory consolidation, pricing renegotiation and restructuring delivery timelines and SLAs?"

"?initiated the first inter-departmental forum on quality standards against a mood of indifference from the management team and then championed all the advantages of learning, knowledge management, sales reactiveness and customer service quality to the point where a major culture shift became possible and showed up on the balance sheet?"

8 Leave them wondering

Some people write CVs so brief they do nothing but shout their headline claims to fame. Other people get stalled on trying to tell the reader everything. The right mix is to give them just enough to start believing in what you have to offer, leaving them plenty to ask when they interview. If you achieve that, you effectively set up the questions they are going to ask and you give yourself all the time in the world to prepare great answers.

9 Write a great cover letter

This is where you sell yourself in relation to the job and you can tailor this in accordance with the job that you are applying for whilst keeping a generic CV. Show in the letter that you have done research about the company and how much of a contribution you feel that you can make to them and the department, section that you will be working in.

10 Be succinct

Recruiters have to plough through a great number of CVs. Two pages are ample, three at the very, very most, would you want to make your eyes saw if you were the recruiter?

11 Don't Oversell Yourself

Notwithstanding the confidence that you have to do the job, in law, lying on your CV is a sack-able offense. So if you do not have that first class degree in quantum physics or even the odd GCSE that you don't really have you take a risk.Also whilst the CV is a tool to get your foot in the door, if you oversell your ability you will at best be found out at interview, or, at worst, hired and then fired because you are not able to do what you bragged that you could at interview.