Ten key points to remember when writing a CV

A job candidate hands over her CV to an interviewer. PHOTO | FILE 

By SCOTT BELLOWS

In Summary

• Firms spend about seven seconds per CV to decide whether a candidate proves interview-worthy.

Continuing in the Business Talk mini-series assisting Nyavula to secure her elusive employment dreams, let us continue with CV writing techniques focusing on how to best present your work experience.

First, when listing your work experience, commence with your most recent or current position. Some CV writers erroneously start from the beginning and go in chronological order.

Such bizarre practice has you first listing perhaps a simple sales job you held after campus first instead of the impressive Vice President of Operations post you currently hold.

Remember that readers hold the primacy effect in their minds. They remember the first of what they read, which forms their general impressions about you.

Since human resources departments spend only an average of seven seconds per CV to determine whether a candidate proves interview-worthy, then throughout your document, list your most impressive accomplishments first in each section.

Since recent positions likely stand as more impressive than long ago roles, every credible career coach recommends listing your newest experiences first.

Second, remember to incorporate your work experience items into tables, not utilising tabs and spacing to separate jobs, work locations, and dates of employment. Then list your major duties and accomplishments for each current and previous position using bullet points.

Pick a bullet point style and stick with it throughout the entire CV. Do not jolt your readers by keep changing your formatting.

Third, do not over-write. If you author an essay-style paragraph for each bullet point, you lose your audience’s interest. Learn the benefits of brevity.

Only showcase necessary interesting facts, not a mundane litany of everything you ever did in that job. CVs should ideally not contain more than three or maximum four bullet points per position.

Then, each bullet point should never contain more than two lines of text in the work experience section of your CV. No paragraphs and no essays should ever find their way onto your CV.

Fourth, involves understanding the right balance between too many petty details about your previous jobs versus salient responsibilities and skills gleaned.

Too many job seekers take up one or two of their valuable four allowed bullet points by listing ridiculously meaningless tasks involved in each of their positions.

Proves meaningless

A sales manager might erroneously list the following tasks next to her position: answered phones, interacted with clients, and drove to client meetings.

However, the entire sentence proves meaningless. Such obvious tasks certainly accompany a sales job. Further, in today’s day and age, who does not already know how to answer a phone?

What a sales manager should state instead encompasses actual accomplishments, such as: Led department to Sh150 million in actualised sales during fiscal year.

Then follow it up with major skills utilised: mitigated client unrealistic delivery expectations with calm negotiation skills that led to a 50 per cent increase in customer satisfaction.

Fifth, when emphasising your work accomplishments, utilise action verbs, not simple verbs. Avoid simple verbs such as: am, is, are, was, were, be, being, been, do, did, does, etc.

Instead bring your text to life with action verbs: achieved, exceeded, served, empowered, etc.

Sixth, many Kenyan job seekers desire to boast about all training they ever attended on each job. Unfortunately, such a practice looks desperate and that you value the wrong thing.

It seems as if you attend trainings just for the sake of gaining recognition and not improving your on the job performance.

An accomplished CEO puts his or her executive experience on a CV and never bothers to include the dozens of trainings attended each year. Such trainings go along with such a job and are implied.

If you serve as a director of Information Technology, then everyone knows you probably attend five or more technology specific trainings each year.

So do not list them unless one might result in a major international accreditation or stands out as highly unusually and strongly desired by employers. Instead highlight actual accomplishments like in point number four above.

Seventh, once you reach 30 years old, remove low-level campus jobs from your resume that you held during your university years.

Once you hold substantial responsibility-laden posts under your belt, employers do not care that you stocked cafeteria shelves, sold SIM cards, or answered phones in an admissions office during your college days.

Eighth, incorporate proper tenses when listing your accomplishments and main responsibilities of work experience.

Make your verbs current (oversee, plan, supervise) or past tense (oversaw, planned, supervised).

Only utilise present tense when discussing your current role: manage a large diverse team, involve employees in bottom-up strategic planning, etc

When presenting past jobs, state everything in past tense: advised Board of Directors on appropriate client acquisition strategies, disciplined errant field supervisors, etc.

Ninth, always proofread your resume before you send it to a prospective employer. Even expert writers always read through all their documents a second time before sending it to any reader.

The relief you feel upon completing your CV may lead to elation that leads you to send it off immediately. Resist the temptation. Read through the entire document again line by line.

You will likely notice a mistake or a way to better phrase an experience on every single line. Spend some extra time proofreading and reap higher employer response rates.

Communicate effectively

Tenth, no one enjoys reading a long CV. So watch your resume length and realise that less detail often results in a more positive reader experience.

In the seven seconds your initial gatekeeper reader spends on your CV, let it count. Top employers, such as McKinsey & Company and Citibank often refuse to review CVs longer than one page due to their time constraints as well as their curiosity about whether you can communicate effectively and concisely.

Less space forces you to write only salient details that help employers more easily make decisions about you.

Next week Business Talk finishes CV writing techniques and jumps into ways to thrive during a job interview. Discuss life planning with other Business Daily readers on Twitter through #KenyaJobs.

Professor Scott serves as the Director of the New Economy Venture Accelerator (NEVA) at USIU’s Chandaria School of Business, www.ScottProfessor.com, and may be reached on: info@scottprofessor.com or follow on Twitter: @ScottProfessor.

In next week’s edition of Business Talk, we explore “Ways to Thrive During an Interview”. Read current and prior Business Talk articles on the Business Daily’s website and www.usiu.ac.ke/blog/businessdaily .