How to write a CV that does the job

You CV is likely to be the first contact you have with a potential employer. Follow some simple advice and your CV could be the first step to your new career.

Sell yourself

A CV is a sales brochure in which you are selling yourself. So right at the top of the first page should be your name in large font. There is nothing worse than having to leaf through loads of CVs and struggling to distinguish between candidates. Your name should leap out.

Follow your name with a one sentence description of yourself, wrapped in a clear box. This should be a section that describes your best attributes and why they fit the role for which you are applying. What I'm saying here it that you should tailor your CV to fit the job. Tell the reader why your skills and experience meet their requirements.

Write this sentence, reread and tweak to improve. Then read again, and rewrite again. Keep doing this until it can't get any better. Unless you are applying for really varied roles, I think this is the one bit of your CV that needs to be changed for each application. As it is just one sentence, make it good. Think about the keywords that the interviewer is looking for.

Here's one example a starting point:

Highly motivated, committed and ambitious team leader, with 4 years' experience managing call centre staff, seeking challenging next step in the customer service industry.

Pick out your key skills and experience

Next you should list your last few jobs. For each you should provide a header including:

• Your job title
• The company/employer name
• The dates you worked

Then under each role outline the key duties you performed, and next to each give specific examples of what you achieved or learned. Use bullet points to enhance the legibility.

So each job section could look something like:

Team Leader, Big Company PLC, July 2008 - Present

• Responsible for performance management of 5 agents
• Key role in project to devise new incentive scheme
• Reduced staff sick days by 25%
• Awarded team leader of the month on 5 occasions

Notice how I've picked out key phrases in bold to draw attention to the achievements. Try to write in short, concise statements that are easy to scan. Interviewers like CVs that are easy to speed read, especially when there are lots of applicants.

Make sure you can back up these statements if they arise as questions in the interview. Never lie, as this can go badly wrong in more ways than one.

List your academic achievements

The importance of your qualifications depends on the stage of your career. For your first full time job, these are very important as you won't have much else aside from part time jobs to talk about. At this point, you may want to list individual results for exams and degrees.

Later in your career, your experience is what counts. A summary of your results will be more appropriate at this point. Although you should list any recent vocational qualification or training courses that are relevant.

And for each of your key qualifications, try to list any key knowledge or skills you learned that are relevant to the role, similar to the example for the job role in the previous section.

Be interesting

Your hobbies and interests section should be pretty concise, but try to include at least one talking point, or quirky fact. Your interviewer is likely to be future colleague and so they'll want to work with interesting and stimulating people.

Plus, you'll be setting up an easy ice breaker question for the face to face. Whenever I've interviewed people, I've tried to find out what they are really like. This is tricky in interviews as people are generally very nervous so I'd look for a question that helps relax the atmosphere. I'd often pull these from the candidates hobbies section.

Keep it short and snappy

Fit your CV onto 2 pages, no more. If it is too long, edit it down - do not just shrink the font size! Your CV should be clear and well formatted with obvious titles and sections.

Put yourself in the place of the interviewer and imagine having loads of CVs to read. What would you look for? Any simple spelling mistake is CV suicide. Same with obvious grammatical errors. Whether you are confident or not in these areas, always use a spell checker, and try to get a friend or relative to proof read your CV.

Don't go crazy with colours and fonts, unless you're a trained designer going for a design job. For everybody else, it can go badly wrong.

And that's my advice. Work through your CV step-by-step and make each section as short, relevant and focused as you can.