For General Job-Seekers
· Your contact details should be at the top of the page. You will need to provide your name, mobile/house number and email address. It is recommended to include your name and mobile in a header or footer. Include page number too.
· Use a professional sounding email address. Keep the silly ones for your friends. Recruiters can use your email address to search for your social media accounts. So it very worthwhile to have one separate email address specifically for job-seeking purposes.
· Ideally, a CV should not be any longer than two pages.
· Keep formatting simple, use bullet points, recommended font – Arial or Calibri and size 10, 11 or 12.
· When composing your ‘personal statement’, avoid jargon, text and slang language. Your CV needs to be and sound professional!
· Use the personal statement to highlight your strengths, particularly in the workplace.
· Work experience – include everything relevant. You can mention summer or temporary jobs – if you have minimal work experience.
· Any gaps in employment - Give a brief in description no need to elaborate.
· Qualifications – if you are including training or certifications that you have completed - always put the most recent ones first and followed by the rest in chronological order. I generally don’t recommend listing training courses that are older than five years.
· Achievements – outlining a performance write it in a form similar to:
‘As chairman of the community fundraising group, I sought out several local commercial sponsors and raised £2000. I have now been trained up as a grants administrator and now decide on how the funding is assigned to different charities and youth groups’.
· Make sure that your CV contains no errors. Ask someone else to review your CV before you send it to an employer. A second set of eyes may see mistakes that you don’t see!
· Do not refer to your gender, marital status, sexual orientation, number of children, religion, political affiliation, trade union membership status, disability status (unless you wish to do so), or relationship status – these have no relevance to your job performance.
· You should not include a photograph unless you are specifically instructed to do so. Photos are popular on European CVs; however this tends not to be the case for Irish and UK based CVs.
· Bullet points are an excellent way to condense information
· Try not to make your CV to ‘busy’ – sometimes less is more. Most CVs tend to be printed in black and white and not colour, so they need to be easy to read.
· Depending on your age, you may need to include some information regarding the lack of work history or why now you are choosing to re-enter the workplace.
· If you are looking to re-enter a field that you left behind several years ago, it would be prudent to emphasise your prior work experience by placing it at the start of your work history, even if this means disturbing the chronological order.
· When sending your CV as an attachment to a recruiter always and I stress ALWAYS send your attached CV with your full name and position that you are applying for - this makes your application instantly recognisable.
o Example: CV.Paula.Donnan.Personal.Development.Coach
o Example: CV.Paula.Donnan.PWC.Administrator.Poisition.
· A tailored CV does take longer to produce, but it is so worth the extra effort. Using keywords and related criteria, the tailored CV will get detected by the ATS software and placed into the hands of the recruiter.
Need some help writing a CV - contact me at donnancoaching@gmail.com
