It’s an unintended topic that I write for my first blog post. I have just read a CV with ten pages of one cousin and decided to share some of my experience in writing CV here. Of course, there are tons of articles and guides out there but at least my experience has helped me have many appointments with employer and received many offers more than ten years ago.
The best common issue of many resumes is too long and not focus. Do you think ten pages resume is better than 2-3 pages? In my CV, I try to wrap all of my ten years working experience in exactly 2 pages. I have read some best practice articles and talk to some friends are being recruiter. Both of them sharing that they only spend about 30 seconds for each CV when scanning list of applicants. It means that if your CV is too long it will be lost focus and it decrease your opportunity. Many friends have relied me to review their CV and most of time I can optimize them to be 2 or 3 pages only because of their bad layout and unnecessary information.
The first thing I do with their CV is customized the margin of page, table and paragraph. After doing this step, one or two pages was removed. Some of CV has included their photo with its size quite large. So decrease it also is a tip. Next step, I review their structure and modify it in case of need.
The second thing must do is highlight your strength point or what yours achieves. This step is extremely important. It would help the recruiter easy to see you when scanning long list profiles. For example, you highlight your best employee in year award or deploy successfully a new business innovation…
The third thing I do is removed unnecessary info – usually is Interest and hobby paragraph. I don’t think this information are useful for employer. Everybody love to listen to music, travel or something like that… Please remove them in your cv. Focus – focus and focus in only skill and experience that match with job position and company. That ‘s all. You also do not need to list all your reference people in your cv. Only provide if have a request.
Overall, the cv should be 2-3 pages, good layout and focus would increase your successful rate. Send your CV to some of your friends and get their feedbacks. Hope that my sharing would help you little bits.