17 September 2020
Your CV is an essential part of job hunting, it is your personal marketing tool which highlights you as a potential candidate to prospective employers. It should tell us more about you, your professional employment experience, skills, achievements and qualifications. Essentially, highlighting why you are a good fit for the role and securing you an interview.
We understand writing a CV can be daunting, so our talent team has put together our Top Ten tips to help. Everyone has their own style of writing, so the below is to help make sure you have all the basics covered.
- Clear formatting and structuring on your CV is fundamental to ensure that the recruiter or hiring manager keeps on reading, you want to keep it simple, easy on the eye but also interesting to look at. You could break down your CV with the use of heads and bullet points.
- Ensure you have all the relevant information on your CV, this includes your contact details, personal profile, key skills, education and any relevant qualifications, employment history/ work experience. If you want to add additional sections, you can also include your hobbies and interests.
- Under the employment history section, include your most recent first, going down in a descending order.
- Your CV should include a mixture of your skills and experience. It helps to create a good idea of your capabilities when you add examples of your key achievements
- Use facts and figures, saying you have increased performance is great, but backing it up with a percentage of how much it has been increased by will impress hiring managers.
- Use key points to attract the recruiters attention, you can always go into more detail during an interview.
- If you have been out of work, don’t forget to add this on to your CV and what you did in this time – Don’t leave gaps as it just prompts the question, ‘why?’. You may have been on a course, developing your skills or busy with volunteer work, just let us know.
- Spell check! Always check for spelling mistakes, also for dates which conflict and any incorrect contact details.
- Our hiring managers love it when the CV is tailored to the role they are recruiting for, or even better accompanied with a personalised cover letter. Use the job advert and the company website to help you align your skillset to the role, which will highlight how your experience will fit the role and in with our Values.
- Keep your CV up-to-date, especially if you are tailoring your CV to a specific role or company, it won’t look great if you use this to apply for something else! It also looks unprofessional if your CV says you currently employed somewhere, but you have moved to another company. Record important events as and when they happen so you don’t forget.
So, you’ve now seen what makes a good CV and what our talent team are looking for, why not search our careers website for our latest vacancies. Find out more: https://www.firstportcareers.co.uk/
