Does your CV stand out?
At some point pretty much all of us will be in the job market looking for a new challenge and a new role. It’s a crowded market but you may just be making it that much harder for yourself by having a poor CV. Your personalised curriculum vitae is your first potential point of contact with your future employer, it is ultimately your tool to market yourself so it’s absolutely crucial you spend time perfecting it.
We see a lot of CVs here at Ocean Edge – some excellent and others not so much – so we thought we would share our top tips to help you make your CV stand out and grasp an employer’s attention.
One of the first and foremost rules of CV writing is not to waffle. Too many CVs contain extensive personal profiles or pages and pages of irrelevant text, which will most probably bore the person reading it. Keep your CV to two pages maximum and if you find yourself writing long sentences, use bullet points. Bullet points look clean and are easy to 
process, which will make your skills more likely to stick in your prospective employers’ mind. You also want to list your relevant experience and skills before describing your education or other areas of your life. Employers don’t want to spend valuable time scrolling through paragraphs of information before they can see what you have done that is relevant to the role.
Another tip is to not waste time on creating fancy borders or adding different colours and text styles. From our experience, employers like to see clear, clean-cut CVs in black and white, with an easy to read font. The aim is to make your experience and skills as simply presented as possible in order for a viewer to be able to read it quickly and gather the relevant information.
In the case of CV writing, less is definitely more.
In terms of context, stay away from cheesy overused phrases that waste valuable space on your CV. Using words such as ‘innovate’ to describe yourself, is not worth writing unless you can prove how you have been innovative. Instead of describing yourself as innovative, detail times that prove your skills. Other over-used phrases include, ‘team player’, ‘hard worker’. Again, instead of using these terms, demonstrate how you are a team player or a hard worker, by detailing your experiences.
Overall, if you make sure your CV is easy to read, clean-cut and ultimately tailored to the job with a simple layout, then you will have the best chance in gaining the attention of your future employer.
Our expert consultants are always happy to help you with your CV, feel free to get in touch.