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According to the statistics, employers rarely spend more than 20-30 seconds for reading the applicants’ resume. Those CVs, which are capable of drawing a recruiter’s attention in that short period of time, will become the tickets for applicants to the next stages of the employment process, such as personal interviews. Others, unfortunately, will join the destiny of the recycled paper. OK, if we have only half a minute to earn the favour of a potential employer with our CVs, how do we do that?
Surprisingly, the answer is simple. Employers read CVs hoping to get particular information about a candidate to define his/her suitability for a particular position. Thus, our task is to provide such information in the most vivid, clear and understandable way in the resume. We need to learn CV writing, so that a potential employer could understand from the first lines of the document that this is the perfect match for a particular job opening in his company.
So, what do employers look for in our resumes? First of all, they search for an explanation of how this particular candidate could help their business. Employment is very much alike with selling yourself. If you fail to explain why an employer should consider hiring (read “buying”) you, your chances for personal interview are drastically reduced.
That is why you have to work on your promotion from the first lines of your CV writing sample, and from the personal statement in particular. However, here is an important note – you have to concentrate on explaining how a company will benefit from hiring you rather than on showing your writing abilities in creating appraisal hymns to yourself. “Buy this phone supplied with 3’’ display, Bluetooth, Wi-fi, Java games, GPS support plus 12 month warranty” will have more chances to sell the phone than “Buy this brand-new phone ever designed by the world leading manufacturer”. This is just to illustrate that CV writing is very close to advertising copy writing.
Describing one’s educational profile is an important part of CV writing experience. Though employers are not likely to pay much attention to reading this section, if you graduated from the Oxford University, then do your best to provide this information at the top of your CV. This should definitely win you a couple of points.
Employment history is, actually, the core of your CV writing masterpiece. So, do pay attention to it and make it tailored. Focus on your previous duties, which are similar to those requested in current job opening – you have to clearly illustrate your capability of taking the required job responsibilities. Start with your most recent job placement and proceed to the previous ones. Sometimes it can be useful to mention only the years (instead of mm/yyyy format) as the start and ending periods, as it is easier to read and can also help to hide short time gaps in the work history ;-)
Finally, during the CV writing mission, it is necessary to turn Skills section into the show room of the additional benefits you offer to your buyer (oh, I meant “employer”). Think about it as if you were offered with two phones for the same price: with and without Bluetooth support. I bet you would choose the one with Bluetooth even if you have no idea what it is and how you are going to use it. The same situation can be observed in employment – if someone demonstrates additional skills, like foreign language fluency or experience in some CRM system, he/she will get better chances in employment.
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