Tips And Tricks To Optimise Your CV
Your CV is a marketing and branding document. It is advertising your experience before you have the chance to meet someone face to face. The content not only needs to be relevant, the CV also needs to be optimised.
What Is Optimisation?
It is looking at how to make the best use of space on the page to effectively convey your message to achieve a desired outcome. In this case, your message is your professional background and the desired outcome is landing a job interview.
Optimisation needs to consider both the human decision maker, the hiring manager or recruiter, and computer based algorithms (job boards etc.)
Content alone isn’t enough when you are potentially battling against 100’s of other applicants.
Optimising For Humans and Computers
Format Is Important
Most people stick to a similar format. This is usually the Microsoft Word template or something very close to this. This is a good starting point but that is exactly what it is, a starting point.
Typically in marketing, it is argued that people read digital content in an F-shaped pattern. That’s why the most important information is placed in (or near) the top left of a website. Although this isn’t strictly true for offline documents, there is still a pattern of reading.
As a rule of thumb, keep the most important information towards the top of the document, keep paragraphs short and make full use of headers/sub-headers.
Not All Information Is Relevant
The hiring manager knowing that you have 10 kids, a loving wife and a dog named ‘fluffy’ isn’t going to influence their decision making. If it does, it’s not the kind of influence you want and can be potentially illegal. Always ask yourself, why am I putting this in?
Space is valuable.
Put It In Context
Information without context isn’t worth the space on the page. You may have saved the company £2m in improvements but without telling the reader anything more, how do they know how much of an achievement it really was?
That £2m saving will be a lot more impressive if they knew the size of the company, the time it took and how you did it (just to show a few examples of how to add context).
The Value Of Buzz Words
Job boards work on a key word search. Recruiters use a number of key words to find CV’s and the more times their search appears in your CV, the higher up the list you appear.
So take the time to think about what someone would search if you were them.
For example, for a metallurgist, a few different words that a recruiter could search: Metallurgy, metallurgist, metallurgical and materials engineering.
If you are struggling, a quick google search usually can give some inspiration.
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