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Showing posts from August, 2020

Too many jobs on your CV? (Or: “Hello, I must be going….”)

 Recruiters are looking for high quality staff that they feel will be able to add some real value to their organisation and importantly, will stay long enough to make a worthwhile contribution. This clearly presents problems for candidates that have a fairly volatile career history and it is even more difficult if that volatility was in the recent past. This gives the candidate two possible options.   The first is to have a bout of severe amnesia and start missing out jobs and doing all sorts of creative stuff to stretch details to cover the gaps. This is not recommended for many reasons, all of which will see you either squirming at an interview when it becomes apparent that “something doesn’t add up” or possibly ejected from a new position when an unexpected reference check is conducted and the information doesn’t match your CV. So: what’s the strategy for overcoming this? The very best advice here is to avoid using the classic “reverse chronological” CV format. This is the ...

You want to write a successful CV – but where on earth do you start?

More realistically, start writing your CV with the end in mind. Still confused? Stop thinking about yourself for a moment and give some thought to the poor soul who will have to wade through the mass of CVs that they will undoubtedly receive for every advertised position. The response could well be in the hundreds, so unsurprisingly, the recruiter’s first task will often be to lighten their load and the easiest way to begin this is to spend a few seconds with each one before deciding to reject it or select it for further consideration. It really is unrealistic to expect a recruiter to read each CV in full, particularly as the majority of them will appear to have been constructed with the aim of making the reader’s task as difficult and joyless as possible. So, with this in mind, how would you perceive that a poorly formatted CV with information randomly spread across several pages would be received? Or, against this background: how would a clear, concise and visually appealing CV be vi...