ash-associates.com UK IT Employment Agency

CV's getting better

Just recently I have noticed a real improvement in the quality of CV's which arrive in our mailboxes.

To emphasize the importance of the CV I thought it was a good idea to reprint the following extract from one of our webpages. Our website has good example CV for either a Software Engineer or Programmer (The format would fit most IT roles) this can be found here

A CV which fails to answer questions is a CV that fails. So be exact when describing your skills and abilities, confirm the content of a Technical Summary by including the technology in your work experience, be repetitive in regard to technology e.g.. C++ mentioned at the end of each project confirms that you have a lot of C++ experience, mention it just once and we assume you have just some C++ experience, this should be the same for all technology.

It's amazing how many times we talk to candidates that have the skills and technology that we seek but have not mentioned them on their CV's.

Be sure to achieve a balance in regard to a length of a CV if you have been working for a number of years then your CV length is expected to be longer than a recent graduates. A good CV length is 2 pages, but for an experienced developer we would expect to see 4 to 5 page CV's.

To assist the CV reader remember to summarise your technology and education on the front page, include a skills/personal profile. When summarising technology list in order of most experience e.g. C, C++ if you have 5 years of C you would put this first if you had say 2 years of C++

The design of a CV should be as simple as possible, for example most employers these days expect CV's by email which means that plain text is the only guaranteed format, using unique text formats/fonts/layouts/TABs etc. may be incompatible with the recipients software and they end up with an indecipherable mess (Never use Macro's these are associated with viruses and most will delete a document with Macro's without reading them [We do] )

Finally it is not a good idea to have spelling errors in a CV or covering letter use the spell checker that comes with the word processor, pay particular attention to technology because if you cannot spell it do you really have enough experience of it to add it to your CV.

posted by Ash Associates @ 2:12 PM