4 ms·

Hi David, Your CV is bottom heavy: much of the interesting stuff is buried in the experience section below the fold, so to speak. In the experience section, t

by shock 12y ago

Hi David, Your CV is bottom heavy: much of the interesting stuff is buried in the experience section below the fold, so to speak. In the experience section, the line spacing is too big for me to be able to easily and quickly form a mental picture of your experience. I should be able to do this in a quick glance. I wouldn't extend the experience section above 2 pages. The bottom line is that I cannot quickly determine what you're about. Unable to determining that quickly, and by extension your 'fitability' to the position I'm recruiting for would make me put your CV at the bottom of the pile to focus on if I don't find any suitable candidates in the easy-to-categorize pile of CVs. I would: - start with the Experience section (no longer than 2 pages) - move everything I can from the Experience section to the Skills section (tech used, etc); if I wouldn't want to list some tech I used just for one job, in the Skills section, I would make it a one-liner at that particular job description: "Technologies used: PostGIS, LDAP, etc" - switch the focus of the Experience section from what I did, to what I accomplished. There's plenty of opportunity for the company to ask me about what I did at the interview; remember: the only purpose of the CV is to get you an interview, not to tell the story of your life. This doesn't mean you shouldn't list things you did that you feel proud of or feel that are very important/relevant. - get rid of the Objective. It doesn't serve the purpose of a CV. I don't think a recruiter wouldn't select you for an interview because your CV doesn't contain an Objective, so it's more noise at best, at worst it makes the recruiter not select you because of something you've written in the Objective. - add some color to the CV. Use different fonts. Experiment with different layouts. Make it memorable! Finally, you are better that you give yourself credit for!

bespoke_engnr 12y ago
That is so helpful; thank you! E-mail me your city and I'll put you on my beer list :-D.
- shock 12y ago
  I've had some more thoughts in the meantime: - switch from using a word processor to a typesetting system (latex or lout); this is important because of signalling[0]. There are numerous CV templates on writelatex and sharelatex. Email me if you need help with this. I use Gummi on Ubuntu with a template I exported from writelatex. - recruiters want to avoid risk. this means that the CV they present to the hiring managers needs have a good chance of being liked and selected by the hiring manager but it doesn't need to be the best in the batch of CVs that were submitted to the recruiter. a recruiter will get flak if he gives the hiring manager ill-fitting CVs but is unlikely to get flak for not giving the hiring manager the best CV in the bunch (simply because no one else will go through all the CVs) - recruiters and hiring managers also want the candidate that gets hired to be able to get the job done because otherwise it reflects poorly on them. keep this in mind always. you know you can get the job done, now you need to signal it to them too. if you see they are undecided, propose to them to give you a 2-week trial project at no monetary cost to them: this tells them you are committed to get the job (and that if they hire you, you'll probably do a good job because employees that are interested in the job do it better than uninterested ones) [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

by shock 12y ago

bespoke_engnr 12y ago

That is so helpful; thank you! E-mail me your city and I'll put you on my beer list :-D.

shock 12y ago
I've had some more thoughts in the meantime: - switch from using a word processor to a typesetting system (latex or lout); this is important because of signalling[0]. There are numerous CV templates on writelatex and sharelatex. Email me if you need help with this. I use Gummi on Ubuntu with a template I exported from writelatex. - recruiters want to avoid risk. this means that the CV they present to the hiring managers needs have a good chance of being liked and selected by the hiring manager but it doesn't need to be the best in the batch of CVs that were submitted to the recruiter. a recruiter will get flak if he gives the hiring manager ill-fitting CVs but is unlikely to get flak for not giving the hiring manager the best CV in the bunch (simply because no one else will go through all the CVs) - recruiters and hiring managers also want the candidate that gets hired to be able to get the job done because otherwise it reflects poorly on them. keep this in mind always. you know you can get the job done, now you need to signal it to them too. if you see they are undecided, propose to them to give you a 2-week trial project at no monetary cost to them: this tells them you are committed to get the job (and that if they hire you, you'll probably do a good job because employees that are interested in the job do it better than uninterested ones) [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory