Life is grand

Going through a bunch of CVs/resumes today and I thought I’d write down a few thoughts in general. Consider this some advice for when you submit your CV.

1. Put your name in the filename of your CV. Don’t attach it as “CV.doc” as we get hundreds of CVs and have to rename them.
2. If you are 20 years old, just out of college and haven’t had a job yet don’t write down that you are “very experienced” in anything except possibly drinking and carousing. Doing projects at home, even public open source ones, is a different experience to working in an office.
3. Make your CV relevant to the job you are applying for. Show me you made some effort and that you aren’t spamming fifty positions with the same CV. You should want to work where you apply, not just be hoping for something to hit.
4. I like a bit of humour but not everyone is going to appreciate it so be careful. And don’t slag off anybody, especially not your past clients.
5. Don’t waste the first page of your CV with just a heading and your name, we don’t like carrying around and flipping through extra paper.
6. Your address, date of birth, gender, nationality and physical characteristics are of the least importance, put them at the end of the CV if at all.
7. Unless the position is sales or deliveries I really don’t need to know you have a full driving license.
8. I prefer CVs in PDF but, sadly, you are probably safer going for Word documents.
9. I got a one page CV for a multimedia position today in PDF laid out with great typography and just the relevant information. Best CV I have seen in ages.
10. If you say you are into web-standards, clean design etc. then make sure your personal site reflects this. If I see Dreamweaver code in there I am going to assume you haven’t got much of a clue.
11. Please get acronyms and abbreviations right. It is XHTML, not Xhtml and it is .NET not .Net. Getting these right shows an attention to detail.
12. Spell check, grammar check. Get someone else to read your CV.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 10:48 am and is filed under Post, cv, resume. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.