On average, a recruiter spends around 6 to 10 seconds on a CV, scanning essential skills and requirements. This scan is to ensure that your CV has the required skills for the position before they invest their time to fully read it. These mere few seconds decide the fate of your CV, whether it will actually be formally considered or will be tossed away to make room for the next one.
To make sure your CV makes an impact enough to give it a full read use the following tips to impress the recruiter:
Understand what they want:
First and foremost, you need to understand what the company wants. In the job posting company mentioned what they require an induvial to do in that certain position. You need to read the job posting very carefully and understand it clearly. You need to analyze yourself by going through your qualifications and your skillsets, and decide whether this job posting is the right match. It is highly unprofessional to apply for a job that does not fall linear to your skillsets and your qualifications. It shows that you are incapable to understand and comprehend a simple job posting. A professional cv writing service company will always ask you about your targeted career field to ensure that when you apply for a job, your resume is always aligned with the job posting.
Easy to read:
As we have established that recruiters only spend a few seconds to scan your CV, in order for them to extract the required information, it is essential to make it easy for them to read and analyze that information. You can deliver this by highlighting important information such as Job titles and their timelines. Breaking information into sections also enables the recruiter to find information easily. Instead of using over-the-top fancy formats, the usage of a simple format also eliminates the chances of confusion and jumbling-up of information.
Remember easy on the eyes, easy through the mind.
Structuring:
The next tip is to structure your information properly. Having a simple arrangement of information eases the recruiter to find the alike information together. Introducing any sort of organizational system to your CV makes it appear more put together and professional as well as makes it more recruiter-friendly. Disorganized information only increases the chances of the recruiter not finding the required information in a limited time.
Mirror the job advert:
The job advert is a well-thought-out set of information that outlines requirements in an orderly fashion. Consider it as the exam question sheet that you get provided with and your CV should be the answer sheet to those sets of questions. You can easily extract the correct information from the job advert, using it as a key and rearranging that information to organize your CV mirroring the job advert.
Write in first-person implied:
Another turn-off for most recruiters is the usage of the third person in a CV. It seems weird and confusing. The correct to approach your CV is with the usage of first-person implied.
Impactful summary:
After the recruiter decided to invest their time in reading your CV, the first impression is through your summary. A short, well-versed, and impactful summary encourages the recruiter to read further. A complete summary consists of 4 components that include experiences, skills, achievements, and soft skills. Experiences should reflect the job requirement; skills should be either equivalent or transferable. Numerical achievements are the most impactful. Soft skills should showcase people skills and how well you work within a company setting.
Using relevant adjectives is a good way to spice up the summary.
Current work experience:
Recruiters focus most on your most recent work experience which may be current as well. The reasoning behind it is that you must be the most evolved version of yourself. It should showcase the best version of your talents and your skills including your position within the organization, the overall goal of your role, and the people you interact with. Other things to list include the tools/software you used, the work that you produced, and most importantly the targets and achievements acquired by you.
In order to save space, you can write about your current role in great detail to give recruiters lots of information and show exactly what you have contributed to your employer while keeping the older roles shortened.
Starting each sentence with an action verb showcases your abilities and shows how efficient you are.
Avoid clichés, only state with evidence:
It is very easy to get caught up in the typical writing styles for your CV using overused adjectives without any backing. Make sure you state everything you write is backed up with evidence. Simple sentences should not only showcase the tasks you performed but should also be followed by a statement of authentication.
Importance of highlight:
Highlighting important information is the only way to make sure to get your message across.
Keep the content relevant and precise:
It is not unusual to be carried away while writing and find yourself with long boring paragraphs that make no sense. A good rule of thumb should be to keep your content relevant and precise. This can easily be done by following the 3 Cs rule; which states that all information should be concise, clear, and complete. Being concise is important because too many words cause misunderstanding and confusion—the shorter the better. Delivering clear information is essential as it eliminates any chances of error. Incomplete information just results in confusion.
Choose an ATS-friendly format:
There are thousands of pre-made formats and templates of CVs available on the internet, that are either over the top or too busy. Recruiters nowadays use some form of “applicant tracking system” to save time and narrow down their search pool. These systems can reject highly qualified candidates for reasons outside of their qualifications such as differently formatted resumes or other technical mishaps. The only solution to this problem is choosing an ATS-friendly format for your CV.
Ensure that your CV looks professional:
Recruiters have to pass split-second judgments on CVs. They are very particular about whether the information they received is correct or not. It is very easy to distinguish false and true as these recruiters have years of experience on their backs. It is very necessary to only present true information professionally and ensure no mistakes were made.
Don’t Mention Personal Details:
Another important thing to keep in mind is that CVs are meant to serve as your professional biography. It is essential that it stays professional and ensures there is no mention of personal details.
Proofread:
Just like researching is the first essential step to starting any project. Similarly, it is vital for the success of any project including writing your CV, proofreading plays an important role. It is very common to discover silly mistakes, irregularities, grammatical errors, and even misspelled words upon proofreading. Without proofreading these errors would go unnoticed and would manage to find their way into the final CV, waiting to be discovered by the recruiters.
Conclusion:
Your CV is your professional biography. A well-written CV can land your dream job while a messy CV can land you a sticky situation. Consider your CV as the ticket for your next Job destination, and give it the utmost importance.
There are a lot of possible ways to ruin your CV so it would be a very intelligent decision to avail professional services by people with expertise in this field.