A Bit About CV Writing
A resume creates the first impression of an applicant. A well-written job description demonstrates both – professional competence and self-confidence.
Recruiters do not read all CVs top to bottom. On average, it takes a professional hiring manager about eight to ten seconds to decide if a candidate passes to the next stage. Some companies use resume-scanning software, which judges the potential employee by the keywords in the text.
Thus, if the application text does not catch the reader’s eye or get around ATS bots, most likely, the candidate will not enter the selection funnel.
Signs of a Good CV
Remember that the recruitment process is the company’s way to solve its problems by hiring professionals. Thus, to get an engaging and well-paid job, it makes sense to be conscious and careful when preparing your resume.
A good CV should be:
- Informative – it should contain all data on relevant experience, education, etc.;
- Concise – make it a one-page CV;
- Memorable – do not copy phrases from standard templates.
Even if a person is an exemplary employee with all the relevant key skills, it still may be hard to draw up a bot-beating resume. There is no question of whether it is fair or whether you deserve some extra career help from professional cv service. Everyone has the right to use career resources and even an occasional career advice expert to craft a winning CV. Here is the list of six main tips to keep as a milestone for a successful job application:
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Customize Your CV
Recruiters appreciate personal attention to the company. Thus, a CV created for a specific position in a specific company is better than a standard one sent as a mailout.
By customization, we mean adding and changing both the TOV and relevant skills for each separate position one wants to apply to. For instance, if you want a job as a designer but work experience features the positions of a marketing manager and a customer support specialist, pay more attention to soft skills like communication with customers, logo design, TOR creation, etc.
Many skills are transferable, so the same experience shown from a different angle can help one apply to the product manager and operations assistant positions.
Do Not Neglect Design
Standard Microsoft Office templates or those downloaded from aggregators will do for some people. Yet, if a candidate is crazy about the prospect of getting a certain job, he or she may want to create a personal template based on the available ones. This step would make recruiters see that this perspective has value for the candidate.
Describe Your Achievements, Not Just Functions
When describing work experience, try answering the following questions with your text:
- What positive changes happened in the company due to my involvement?
- What are the indicators of my achievements that I can show in numbers? For instance: I designed and implemented a new sales management system, which made the company’s revenue grow from 11% to 18% over the year.
- What did I do the non-standard way? How did it help me solve work problems?
Every employee has achievements even if he thinks otherwise.
Reveal Your Goal At the Very Beginning
Start the text by highlighting the reasons underlying this application. For instance, one willing to work in a chosen company should mention what aspects of its operation catch the applicant’s interest. Also, he should mention the specific project and the relevance of his experience to this project.
Highlight the Relevance
Corporations are not charity funds willing to hire humans for the sake of doing a good deed. They solve business problems through their employees. So, keep in mind that a resume should show your readiness to work as a goal-oriented part of the mechanism.
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Be Open To Communication
Sometimes people provide only a phone number or just an email. Doing so could make recruiters think that such a job applicant does not want to get contacted. So do the following things to show your passion for the job and open dialogue:
- Give all contact data available (including WhatsApp, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Do not put notes like ‘call from 9 a.m. till 6 p.m. only’ next to the phone number.
- Answer calls and e-mails within two days.
Do a Grammar Check
Read your resume several times. To make the text fit into a single page, remove all bloated phrases, colloquial expressions, and professional jargon. Use online grammar and spelling checkers to find tiny mistakes and inconsistencies. A clear and well-structured resume gives a higher chance to become a prospective employee.
Things One Should Not Use In a CV
“The more, the better” is not an efficient resume-building strategy. These things would do no good to a job application:
- Personal Biography. Never write a resume as a continuous text in chronological order.
- Explanations of the gaps and switches in career.
- Skills applied only once. For instance, one-time participation in negotiations does not count as negotiation skills.
Conclusion
Help the recruiter, especially in the case of recruiting firms, make your candidacy appealing to the hiring manager. When an HR has to struggle through long text escribing irrelevant facts, he would not waste his time finding reasons to hire this laborer.
So, approach CV creation with the utmost seriousness to get more interviews and land a job.
