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There is no 'proper' way to layout a CV, but there are some broad guidelines worth following to ensure that your experience and pitch for a role creates the desired impact.
1. Personal Details
Name
Personal details: Location (Town and postcode is sufficient if space is at a premium), contact details (mobile and email), nationality (or entitlement to work) and driving licence if applicable.
If you are struggling for 1st page space these can be left until the end of the CV, but it is still worth putting your home town or location at the top. Postcodes are important because recruitment software uses them to calculate distances.
Many CVs make the mistake of omitting contact details, probably because they are attached to an email that contains them. However, DO NOT leave off contact details. Often, by the time a recruiter is reviewing the CV it will be detached from its original email.
2. Qualifications - 4/5 max lines if possible
Providing a quick indication of your academic background gives a ‘tick’ for the reviewer. If you feel that you are under qualified in comparison with your contemporaries in your industry, then leave this section until the end and first ‘sell’ your experience.
3. Work history - in reverse chronological order, most recent role and employer first.
Format:
Date, Job Title, Employer
Summary of employer (if not recognisable brand/business), area of business, turnover.
Role details - Include an indication of the scope and scale of the role
Achievements - Detail a few key highlights of your time in the role
4. Interests - Keep these brief, 1 or 2 lines, and only enough to give a flavour of who you are.
Speed of impact
This is absolutely crucial.
The key information sought by a recruiter or hiring manager is your current or most recent relevant role. This is where a recruiter starts filtering. Without an early indication of the required experience the application could be unsuccessful. It is not unusual to receive 100s of applications for a role, so a recruiter needs to filter efficiently – They will not read several hundred personal profiles before checking the required work history is included in the CV.
If the chronology of your work history makes it difficult to get the most significant relevant role on the first page of the CV then use a summary box of dates, employers and roles at the beginning of the CV so that the recruiter immediately knows whereabouts to look for the information that they are after.
High level of impact - Achievements
Ensure that your performance in roles is included in your CV. Not just what you’ve done, but how well you did it. An absence of achievements on a CV can give a very poor impression; not least that just being present was enough. It is crucial to ensure that your CV does not just look like a job description with a name at the top of it, and that you demonstrate what you brought to the role and business.
Context
A lack of context is a very common error on a CV.
Some examples of poor context:
Listing words such as this example of a 'skills' section
Skills
These bullet points indicate only that the author can spell. To gain merit attributes should be demonstrated through examples of their application, eg:
Often some examples of achievements may be relevant, but lacking in crucial context, such as this example of an ‘achievements’ section
Achievements
Whilst these achievements may have been significant, without knowing the scale or scope of the picking process, what BOEC or PARC is, or the scale of the logistics operations, the reader cannot determine how impressed they should be. These achievements and all areas of your CV should be clear to any reader, or at a minimum, someone from your industry.
A lack of context or information on each Employer is very common. A long list of business names that are not household, with no turnover figures, or indication of the business activity is a very fast way to lose your reader – The rest of the information, no matter how well presented, becomes impossible to relate to without industry or scale.
Your CV should be impactful and compact – that is, every line should add to your case for being requested for interview, with the more important or relevant the information the earlier it is presented.
If reviewing your own CV, try to take a step back from yourself – ask yourself, ‘would I understand what this means?’, and ‘would it impress me if I didn’t have all the background knowledge?’ If someone else is reviewing it, ask them which parts don’t mean anything to them. If they ask questions, see if you think the answers should be in the CV – would that information strengthen your CV?
Having read large numbers of CVs, the most common oversight? Presenting all of the previous roles in the present tense is a frequent error. This gives an impression of a lack of attention to detail or care that is easily avoided.
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