You have spent ages working on your CV to make sure that it really shows the value that your unique set of skills and experience can bring to a job.
However before submitting it, take a few minutes to see if you can further improve it by following these 7 steps to ensure that all parts of your CV complete the picture you want to paint of yourself:
- Use the same format for all your jobs even if you think a position would be better suited to a different layout – when it comes to your CV, you must be consistent throughout. This consistency means that if you use bullets, they must be formatted the same way and don’t use bullets to highlight a job title for one job and then achievements in another job.
- Always list the name of your Degree before the school or university you attended – hiring managers spend very little time reading your CV so make sure the important information is easy to find quickly.
- Be consistent with spacing between lines and after punctuation.
- Use a font size that can be easily read. In other words, don’t use anything lower than a font size 10 although 11 or 12 for the body text is better and stick to fonts that are easy to read and look professional – some fonts can be difficult to read no matter their size.
- Cover up any gaps in your career history effectively by mentioning what you did during that career break. It is much better to mention any volunteering, personal development, further education, helping a friends business, etc. that you may have done rather than trying to hide any gaps.
- Write in the first person. Your CV is all about you and what you have achieved and therefore should be written from the ‘I’ perspective. However, you do not use the personal pronouns i.e. you do not include the ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘my’ when writing your CV so rather than saying ‘I managed…’ you write ‘Managed…’.
- Keep sentences short as this makes it easier for the reader to read your CV quickly.
While many of these may seem fairly obvious, double check your CV anyway and on a final point, even if you think your CV is perfect, print it off and re-read a paper copy of it and ask a friend to proof read it for you too!
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence. – Vince Lombardi
