7 Top Tips to Writing a “Killer” CV

Many of the CVs I read as a career coach and skills advisor fall in to 2 categories:

• The “yawn” category – these are the bland, templated, no personality 2 pages that would do an M15 agent proud

• The ego centric CV – these tell your audience What's In it For Me (the Candidate) and not What's In it For Them (the Employer).

The tricky thing about a CV is that it is a mixture of an autobiography and a marketing tool.  In fact most people don’t even know what CV stands for – Curriculum Vitae is Latin for “Book of Life”. Using the Book analogy – if the flyer is not interesting (the top half of the first page), then why should the reader bother to read further?

I could go on, but I'd rather spend more time suggesting ways to make your CV relevant and interesting to the person reading it.

Here are 7 tips on writing a CV that hits all the buttons:

• Personal Branding Statement – Create a clear, concise personal branding statement or elevator pitch that describes the position you want, and a single subject matter expertise (out of the many you have) that solves the biggest problem that the company and hiring manager has

• Achievements - Select Achievements that demonstrate the problems you've solved and their effect on the company's bottom line. Don't list all the problems you've solved – just choose examples that are relevant to the problems the company, department, and manager currently have

• Customise your CV – Customise your CV with Achievements and keywords that are relevant to the company to make your CV A "MUST READ".  Build rapport by using the company's own language to describe your accomplishments, rather than the language of your prior company. Use plain English and avoid using acronyms and jargon that only people in your prior company would understand.

• Address employer and hiring manager problems – Before you can address them, you have to understand what they are to begin with. Start your research before you even send a CV, to make it relevant.

• Include "nice to have's" – Hiring managers typically short list interviewed candidates to a final three to choose between. While most of the interviewed candidates are all qualified to do the job, a few usually stand out from the pack because of a "nice to have."  This could be a skill, quality or experience that the hiring manager didn't even think of when listing job criteria, but recognised its importance when discovered on a CV or in an interview. These "nice to have's" can often make the difference between getting the offer and just being one of the pack. Voluntary work or examples of professional development are two of the differentiators.

• Demonstrate Subject Matter Expertise – Listing your general skills or what you did on a day to day basis is not exciting. It's not likely to be as important to your future employer, since no two jobs have the same needs and no two companies have the same day to day responsibilities. Your future employer is interested in what problems you can solve for them. The best way to demonstrate this is to understand your target's current problems, giving specific examples of your expertise in solving these (or very similar) problems, and branding yourself as a subject matter expert.

• Why you want the job – If you haven't conveyed to the hiring manager why you want that specific job at that specific company in a way that is beneficial to them, you haven’t got a chance! A hiring manager isn't interested in the fact that you want to move ahead in your career, that you want specific experiences, or that you'll take just about any job to keep paying your mortgage. A hiring manager is only interested in the fact that you want the job because you have demonstrated expertise to solve their specific problems.

Investing time in getting your CV right pays dividends down the line.  For more information on CV writing and Career Management Strategies, contact Katherine Wiid of Recrion at 01780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk.