CV

Why doesn’t your CV get you noticed?
 
I’m a technical recruiter. I look at CVs all day long. I’ve been working for Conex Europe as a .Net specialist for over 6 years – if I said I look at probably 100 CVs per day, the math is astounding – I’ve viewed somewhere in the region of 132,000 CVs.
 
So, why isn’t your CV getting you anywhere? Recruiters become conditioned to skimming CVs. When you’re looking at the quantity we do, you have to. But we also like ‘pretty’ CVs. The amount of times I literally just click off a CV as it is ineligible is shocking, people you need to realise that if I’m doing that you can bet your bottom dollar that end clients would be too.
 
What should be in your CV then?
 

Why do we believe that CVs are so crucial – admittedly only at certain times of our life? When we feel that we need one (or that we need to update our own), there is an almost manic sense of it being “mission critical” - the first thing that we ought to be doing.
 
Whether you will feel like that having read this is your decision. We would just say – be careful!
 
What's a CV good for?
 

After reading the book of Seth Godin, Purple Cow… Several ideas and thoughts came to my mind. In this book, Seth Godin explains that companies need to be remarkable to be successful nowadays… beforehand companies could create boring products and put a lot of ads on TV, and that was pretty much it! And it was working well!
 
Information overload
 
Now the audience is more demanding, has less time and the number of choice is bigger…so you need to be remarkable to get noticed.
 
You need to create a purple cow (because all the “normal” cows are white, black or brown but not purple…) to be remarkable.
 
You also need to be focused on a niche and not selling everything to everyone. You need to focus your money and work on a small niche of sneezers or early adopters who will spread the word.
 
CV overload
 
A CV is a 2D document made of a boring listing of duties and responsibilities. As a recruiter, I have seen hundreds of CVs, I can tell you, they are all the same. And those that are noticed are not noticed for the right reasons (fantasy font, colors, funny pictures).
 
And even if we need to follow certain rules, people forget that CVs are here to show skills and demonstrate them i.e. prove your skills. They put a job description of their current job on their CV instead of putting figures or quoting some successful case studies.
 
The good old days
 
But back in the days, you just needed to send a CV and it was working well… I do remember my father telling me he just sent a written CV by mail and got 2 interviews the following week (in the 70s). The number of educated people using CVs was quite low, the word to mouth technique was widespread. So the CV was a very efficient tool.
 
The cut-throat situation of today