Mind every detail on your CV
A Résumé’ is the attorney we dispatch to the office of the employer to represent us. For a single job opening, scores of such intelligent lawyers arrive almost simultaneously from well-qualified and generously hopeful client-jobseekers. And if you were a party in settlement where the rest send their best, I guess you will not also hesitate to be represented by the best possible that you can lay your hands on.
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The job hunting is a chain of activities that culminate in a handshake and the signing of a contract of employment, however menial the employment. The résumé writing is often the first thing in this chain of activities that we carry out. That being the case and the résumé having assumed this profoundly important status, understanding the role of this document and the potential it holds to getting us in the YES, NO or MAYBE trays are as imperative as the job we are seeking.
When we are professionally qualified, are within the age desirable by the employer and with the right gender, if our CV ends up at first sight into the No tray, it is clear we sent the daftest lawyer to compete for us. Even if our CV ends up in the MAYBE tray, we should still contend that we could do better. But if our CV is dispatched to the bin as soon as it hits the reviewer’s eyes, we should very much blame the man who selected the lawyer than the attorney who represented us.
Note these
Every CV must have an owner and CURRICULUM VITAE should not be that person. Place your name on top of the document. Never title your résumé a CV, curriculum vitae. Whatever you decide to call it, make sure that name is the same as your name the way it is captured on your particulars and certificates.
Be mindful of your fonts: choose the sizes lying between 16 and 20 for your name. Longer names may go for the minimum while shorter ones may make do with twenty. Times New Roman is exceptionally appropriate for this. It may be suicidal to leave your name in lower cases.
Lower the case, the font sizes to about ten and put your address next. The postal address may be old fashioned but the penalty for adding one is far less grave than omitting it. In your shoes, I will. Follow this on the next line with your active phone number(s) before ending the third line with your email address. If the email is precisely your name, that is better than luvyu13@ yahoo.com. Centre these three lines midpoint below your name and ensure your line spacing for these addresses is 1.0
Social media accounts
Your WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, et cetera addresses may come but that depends on the kind of corporation that is the recipient of your document. While old but reinventing businesses may welcome these innovations, old, conservative businesses may find every reason possible to persecute the candidate with such novelties.
Personal brief
The next most central quality of a résumé is that it has to be able to profile us in an irresistibly favourable manner that the person reviewing the document is lured by this sheer self-introduction of the kind of person we are on paper. Successful CVs are written such that this introduction is short but able to assemble every bit of useful vocabularies that best and most positively profile the bearer.
That introduction is variously titled “profile,” “Person Summary,” :….at a glance” et cetera. This is captured mostly on top of the paper on the line immediately below our address. The reason it does not go beyond two statements is that the document itself is a résumé (French word for summary) and so should not be mistakenly extended beyond the few words that suffice as a general profile.
Examples
A talented hands-on mechanical engineer with vast experience in Cummins diesel engines and limited but valuable knowledge in hydraulics and pneumatics.
A BBA-holding bilingual (French & English), broadminded and widely travelled sales expert with three years of experience in FMCG and about two years of creating opportunities for small tech businesses. Has vast experiences managing corporate online as well as personal relationships and managing customer expectations.
Be mindful of the fact that the profile is usually the answer you produce if someone with high stakes in your next job meets you personally and offers you the opportunity to describe yourself in two sentences. If you can do this to the satisfaction of the person here, you have a profile capable of enticing your next employer.
Simplicity
When your résumé is cast like a little artwork with the attraction necessary to capture and retain the attention of the reviewer and even awe her, you can be sure your document may miss the NO tray and prepare you for the next set of challenges ahead. Whether the reviewer is taking part in the real interview or is a junior officer commissioned to shortlist as per some rules of engagement, you can be sure she will shortlist your document and proceed to get you on the HRs table.
Be simple and avoid unnecessarily complicated language. Resist the sometimes overwhelming temptation to turn your résumé into an artwork. Even though a show as this may pass once in a long while, in about 80 per cent of the case, you will be considered a grave joke.