Written by SpotACheetahCoach | 17 February 2012

CVs; we all have them, we’ve all read them and we all hate them.

If Cthulhu himself had been sitting about on his throne of skulls or whatever thinking about the most horrific punishment to inflict on every working man and woman between the ages of 16 and 65, he would not have gone far wrong with the invention of the Curriculum Vitae. Coming from the Latin expression meaning; “to put ones-self up for ridicule”, curricula vitarum have been the mainstay of HR decisions for nearly two millennia.

However this does not mean that we have this shit nailed down in the modern world. Despite the fact that the internet seems to be a hotbed of narcissism, right up to the point that a website where you put up photos of yourself and your mundane hobbies is exceeded in popularity only by a website that allows you to bleat incessantly about how fiendishly awesome that Marmite sandwich you just ate was (this is a great time to plug my Twitter feed).

So you would be forgiven for believing that we are breeding a generation who know how to talk long into the night about how fantastic they are but if you have actually read a CV in the last 10 years then you will be well aware that they are about as exciting and dynamic as last Tuesday’s donkey-testicle stew.

I’m not going to pull out any specific examples of slipshod work but I am going to give you some pointers on how to make your CV less likely to enrage a potential employer (if your potential employer is a loud, opinionated and largely irascible pillock).

Did you read the application requirements?

I mean did you really, REALLY read them? About half of all the CVs I’ve ever received, in my various jobs as king of crushing peoples dreams, neglect some ball bouncingly obviously, but vital point. Don’t ever think that you can interpret the instructions, feel free to ask a single question (One and only one – I’m not made of god-damned time!), but do not assume that because you don’t understand or agree that the requirement is null and void.

Follow the instructions to the letter, if it tells you to Sellotape your application to a rabid, Tampuli llama and post it to the moon, but also gives an email address for “questions”; then ring the Virgin Galactic and find out about their live animal transport policy. DON’T use that email address unless you’re asking where on the moon signs for llama deliveries.

Design is not just for metrosexuals.

When you go out on the town do you rummage through your discarded clothes bin from the thirty years ago and pick out the outfit that looks the most generic and laughably infantile? No, no you don’t, well unless you’re going to an 80′s costume party as Andy Pandy and that almost never happens. When I go out I usually make an effort to at least put on this decade’s styles and try and keep it as free of my sons half chewed rusks as possible.

When you send out a CV in one of MS Word’s ultra dull tabulated formats that just lists things, what you are actually doing is telling the recipient that you don’t give enough of a toss about the application to make it NOT look like a spreadsheet. When you do a pitch or a website or even a comment to a friend on Facebook, I’m willing to bet you try and make it as visually appealing as possible with pictures and graphics abounding, so don’t skimp on your CV, or it will make you seem dull. I’m not saying you have to go all art-school-ninja on the document but please, for the love of God, don’t use a sodding table. If your CV looks cool, you look cool. Cool may not be a requirement of the job but the Fonzie effect is the best way of getting you to step three…

Attention to detail

I’m sitting here in my velour chair, drinking my Lapsang souchong, stroking my cat and sifting through the applications that have made it through and settling in to decide who gets interviewed to be the next head of the all-expenses-paid holiday testing facility on Sex Island. I’m in a bad mood because I have to read through 50 largely boring documents, that are not at all about me, and then I have to try and work out from this single document whether to spend tens of thousands of pounds on hiring you to do a job that I am largely unsure of what it consists of.

Anything could set me off. A quick glance at the cantankerometertm shows readings approaching “grumpy pensioner” levels and my natural vindictiveness is starting to cast about looking for a tiny failing on which to base a wildly arbitrary decision about your onward career. Don’t make it easy for me. If you misspell my name. Bin. If you misspell anything. Bin. Don’t know the difference between “your” & “you’re”? Bin. Over use of acronyms? Bin. Forgot to capitalise the company name the way it is branded. Bin.

Jon tells me that there are people out there who are not as mean spirited or pedantic as me when employing people, but think of it this way: If you are Jon and you have two CVs and one is addressed to ‘Jo Norris’ and the other is addressed to ‘Jon Norris’; which of those people are going to get a job? Oh and don’t put “fantastic attention to detail” in your CV. You are just asking the reader to perceivegrammar errors and then gleefully throw your application away.

Covering letter

Remember you may be dealing with someone like Perez Hilton or even me. At heart all employers are cantankerous, self-important fascists, who believe they can do everything you can do (but better) and are simply running out of time in which to dispense the quantity of awesome that is incumbent upon them. Hence they need a near genius-level, totally infallible superhero that can complete the quantity of work that they IMAGINE they do in a day (Ed: so roughly about 10 times what you do then?).

The covering letter is where you show that you can essentially do anything that the employer might throw at you. Don’t make it long but remember that an employer might not even read your CV (unless it is really pretty) without being suitably impressed by your superhuman potential and generally confident sounding demeanour. Plus you can totally elude to random stuff in the covering letter that you want to do rather than being bound to experiential information.

Remember as well that this letter is nowadays an email so you can feel free to write it like an email. After all, when was the last time you actually got a letter that wasn’t telling you you owed some corporation money for water/electricity/telephone/etc? The chances are that your recipient is similarly post starved and will respond much better to an email written as though you are talking to a human being rather than your great grandfathers boss at the cotton mill. Be polite but not stuffy.

Relevance

I don’t give a badgers todger if you completed a gruelling 6 month course in Spanish jazz-tap during the gap year you spent rescuing orphan baby seals from an oil spill, if you’re applying for a SysAdmin job. Your additional experience, however fantabulous, is not going to help you get to grips with an Apache server that constantly gzips anything with the extension “.html” (why would anyone even program that in?) and that is all I care about.

After I meet you, or during the interview, I’m willing to find out more about you as a person, but at the resume stage I only want to read facts about the stuff you’re applying to do. Other stuff is taking up space in my brain that could otherwise be used for thinking up new sandwich combinations.

It is not a biography

Keep it short. The entire CV should fit on one side of A4 and it should print on one side of A4. If you use more than one side, it probably won’t be read. Don’t worry about leaving stuff out, if you are good at your job you will be hard pressed to wedge half of your relevant experience on to that page but that means that everything your future employer sees is absolutely relevant and not at all filler.

If they want to know more about you, they’ll get you in for an interview. This will also force you to be a bit more creative with the space and creative often means more eye-catching. I’m pretty sure that everyone and their brother thinks that this is impossible or a bad idea but remember that iPhone you just bought? Were you initially attracted to it because the manual was really, really comprehensive?

Getting in order

So you went to the Ringsworth Institute for Gifted Children when you were 13 eh? So what? Unless I’m an alumni of your particular establishment then I don’t care and if I am an alumni there is a 50:50 chance I hated it anyway. I like to know that you went to school somewhere but if you are more than two jobs away from your education then simply stating that you passed is good enough.

When I was at school I had to learn a bunch of stuff that subsequently turned out to be complete bollocks. They told me that electrons orbited the nucleus of an atom like planets around a star, Columbus discovered that the earth was round in 1492 and The Great Wall of China can be seen from space. All off this is total crap. Electrons only exist in probability clouds, Pythagoras knew the earth was round in ages-ago BC and The Great Wall of China, while pretty big is not THAT big. My ideal CV is set up in this order:

1. Put your contact details in the header and footer.
2. Give an overview that showcases how closely you read the advert and displays a thesaural ability to take what was written and regurgitate it but this time with your name instead of “the idea candidate”
3. Put in your most relevant job
4. Put in your other experience
5. Put in that you were educated somewhere
6. Depending on who you’re talking to; Put in an “about me” section but remember that the recipient of the CV has already pulled up your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profile (You should have linked to one or all of them anyway) so keep it short and make it interesting.

Conclusion

 

You are statistically unlikely to be accepted for every job you apply for but as people’s initial impression is often the one that lasts you want to make that as favourable as possible, then you can only blow it in the interview. A good Curriculum Vitae, while being fashioned from pure evil like all good marketing, is still the best way of getting someone else’s money in your pockets.