Seven Lucky Tips for Writing a CV
by The CV is an important part of getting any job, be it a position flipping burgers in McDonald’s, or a professor of physics at Cambridge.
I live in a very economically poor area, and so jobs are a precious resource, for every person with a job around here in my age group, there’s at least one other without. Competition for work is very fierce. Using the tips I’m about to describe to you below, my CV has secured me many interviews in this competitive market. I hope you find them useful.
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Use a Template
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Less is Better
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Your CV Should Contain
- Personal contact details: Name, address, telephone numbers, e-mail. If you don’t know these, you’re applying for the wrong job in the wrong life.
- Your qualifications: Don’t bother including anything less than GCSE’s/ O levels/ High school. No one cares about your SATS.
- Work experience/employment history: Get creative here. You didn’t mow your neighbor’s garden, you where a manual labourer. Include previous jobs, work experience done with school, job shadowing and so forth. Include the dates you did each of these things as well as where you did them. In other words: Date, Employer, Job description. It’s easy to make these just too long. Keep them very concise; describe your job, and the aspects of it your prospective employer will be most interested in. This will probably be the largest section on your CV.
- Other skills/ points of interest: Tailor to the job. If applying for bar work, tell them about your hobby of home brewing. If applying for computer work, tell them about how you provide a tech support service to your friends. Basically, anything pertinent that you don’t have a piece of paper for (Also called a qualification), put it in here.
- Hobbies and pass times: Be honest, but don’t be too honest. If you make up a hobby that you think your employer may find interesting, then they will expect you to know something about it. And then when it comes to interview you’ll look like a right numpty. On the other hand, listing “Jerking off to lesbian Goth porn” on your hobbies is not going to gain you any points. If possible, try to find out something about who will be reading your CV so if you have any pass times they find disagreeable (And you’d be surprised what some people find disagreeable), you can avoid listing them. In this section you can normally get away with straying from the “only what”s pertinent to the job’ rule, but keep it short! Employers reading this are trying to gauge your personality; they don’t really care what you do in your spare time.
- References: Choose at least two, and make sure they don’t mind you handing their contact information to a prospective employer. Generally, employers will not contact a reference unless you get to at least the interview stage of a job application, so putting “References available on request” is a perfectly acceptable thing to put on a CV. Just make sure you have those phone numbers ready if asked.
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Write a Cover Letter
Do a Google search for CV template and you will find many options. Using one of these templates is a good idea as it makes your CV look a lot more professional, and a professional looking CV will attract more initial attention than one that looks like it was thrown together in 10 minutes on notepad. Check this out for an idea. I use template number five myself, as it looks developed enough to stand out- yet it’s not so over developed that it looks gaudy. But, find one you like.
A CV is supposed to be a BRIEF overview of your history and capabilities, not a biography. If you include every little thing a prospective employer might find interesting then by the time you’re 25 your CV will be longer than the yellow pages. A CV should be one page. Two if you really can’t drop anything out of it. If you need to trim your CV down, then only include what is relevant to your current application. Let me state this very clearly:
If you cannot fit everything into a CV, only include what us relevant to the job you are applying for. Alter your CV to suit the job you are applying for.
Many people make one CV and hand that it at every job they apply for. This does not work, trim it down and make sure only the gold rather than the gold and the ore is present. If you feel this leaves your CV selling you short, then add something like “I have also worked in other areas, and would be happy to supply details on interview” at the end of the appropriate section (replace “worked in other areas” with; “have other hobbies”/ “other suitable qualifications”/ whatever as appropriate).
A covering letter is a short letter (no more than 500 or so words), that you hand in with your CV when applying for a job. The covering letter is your chance to actually try and communicate with the employer, rather than just give them facts (the CV’s job). Tell them a LITTLE about who you are, but focus mainly on the job, explain why you’d be good at it, your previous experience and try to sound enthusiastic. Don’t lay it on too think though or you’ll come across as creepy. Write a few covering letters and have your friend’s read them to get an opinion on if you’re getting the balance right.
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