CV writing advice?
 

Can I know what is the typical length of your CV? Mine is 5 pages long because I did a bit of elaboration at what I did at each workplace.

I've checked out some samples on the internet and it seems many don't; they just have a one liner showing their period of employment at various places. I feel that this approach won't make us look good and will not show our achievements.

For those of you who got new job offers that came with pay raises instead of pay cuts, can I get some idea of how you wrote your CV?

Showing a 10pages resume doesnt prove anything. I can write a 20page resume too. But I bet the employer will not have time to read thru your resume.

Short and simple, and explained them during interview.

My g/f is from HR, she say CV is the most over-rated thing candidates think they have. Many think CV is crucial to get good jobs, pay etc when in fact most employers dun even bother to read before interview. I never work in HR before, but I think what she say makes sense.

Think about it this way, unless you are applying for senior management position, every job posting got 50 to hundreds of CV. Do you think any employer going to waste time reading them? First round CV screening also normally done by junior HR staff or some junior manager for the job. The standard procedure is to throw out the obvious and just pick the first few randomly to do interview.

If can find good one, offer. If not, pick another few to interview again. A lot of companies nowadays outsource to recruiters to do the 1st round screening. No matter what the recruiters tell you about helping you to convince employers to see you, fact of the matter is they don't. They'll do essentially the same thing: Out of 100 CV, throw out the 50 obvious misfit, then pick 10 out of 50 and send the CV to client and do basic admin work like schedule for interview.

CV is not over-rated. A well written and well formatted CV gives the impression of meticulousness and conscientiousness that all bosses like. Anything that forms the potential employer's first impression of you cannot be over-rated.

The first CVs that I weed out from the pile are the badly formatted ones. If the candidate cannot bother to standardize the font and the format, then it doesn't feel like he takes pride in his work. We all want smart people who also take pride in their work, not just smart people who just do the thinking and leave the rest to others.

Then goes the under-qualified ones. Then those that are badly written: if, given all the time you want, you cannot write proper sentences or convey effectively what you did, then something is wrong.

Finally, if your working experience is less than 10years, i don't see why you need anything more than 1 page of CV. A CV is a succinct summary of the RELEVANT experience you want to tell me when you are applying for my job, it is not meant to be a brain dump of your life story; leave those for your biography's editor when you are 80. A long CV is invariably a brain dump that contains a lot of irrelevant information, and it is a sign of lazyness.

my advice is to maintain a master CV that can be of any page length. when you apply for a job, keep only those experience and education that are relevant to the job to 1 page. 4-page CV is an overkill.

For an example of a good CV format, see the standardized Harvard Business School MBA CV: 1-page; tight; no excessive spacing; relevant

This is all very sensible and logical -- if the employer bothers to read your CV. How many times people go for interview to realise that interviewers are asking questions as they read along your CV on the spot?

This is a clear indication that they have not read your CV and are whacking questions, reading your CV and hearing your answers at the same time. In short, even if your CV is fantastic, they are just starting to read it as you are being interviewed.

You can't blame HR or hirer actually, they see dozens of CV everyday and have many other things to do besides recruitment. Like I say, they will bump off the obvious CMI ones, but other than that it's just random numbers game most of the time. My ex-boss lagi best, he only read 2 things, current pay to ensure budget met and sum up total years of relevant experience, tell HR the ones he shortlisted and proceed to interview by saying "tell me more about yourself".

I never do recruitment before, but from experience going for interview I agree with above that most interviewer are clueless about my background before that.

Usual what happen is they ask me to describe myself or ask me what is my current job scope and I spend 10 minutes explaining while they eyeball the printed resume at the same time. I also notice a lot of them have my resume printed out, but made no notes before that at all.

I'm sorry you met all the lazy employers, or maybe you were interviewing at mickey mouse firms that don't really care.

From where i am and were, we do read the CV. And even if we employers don't read it beforehand, they will read it while interviewing you. That makes a clear and succinct CV all the more important. between a 1-pager that is clear and well written and a 5-page jibber jabber, you know which one the employer prefers, whether he is reading it before or during the interview.

First of all, the interviews I go to are mixed. Got SME and also have MNC, generally not much difference as far as I can tell. The MNC ones tend to be more structured, got fixed questions, behavior analysis type question or sometimes role play, but most don't really know or remember much about my CV.

That's the point. If you can already get an interview even when they dun read before hand, your performance or acting skills during interview are going to be much more important than how good you write your CV.

Of course broken English and crappy CV is big no no, but the point I'm making here is CV is not really a game changer, having a superb CV compared to a good CV is not going to make much diff. If you have managed to impress your employer in interview, they are not going to go back and read your CV and say "his CV not really impressive, so let's reject him".

Similarly if you failed to impress during interview, employer also not going to say "well at least his CV looks superb, let's hire him". A CV only useful in getting employer to call you down, all I'm saying is that most of the time they don't even have time to read in detail what your write, they will just throw out obvious lousy ones and tikam the remaining.

I don't think you got my point. My point is your CV forms part of the first impression that potential employers have of you. Even if he reads your CV while interviewing you, your CV will go on to influence his opinion of you. CV is not just to secure the first interview, it is a very powerful "impression" tool.

And you do agree that a well written and formatted CV is important for the right impression whether the employer read it before or during the interview. So I don't know what you are arguing about.

It's also impt to know the difference between CV and résumé. Using the wrong one in front of the HR / hiring manager ruins the "first good impression".

CV: focuses more on educational qualifications; for fresh grads or people with less than 1-2yrs full time working experience.

Résumé: focuses more on work experience; for people with more working experience.

Actually there's no difference. The 2 terms are used interchangeably. Don't be pedantic.

nah. they have significant differences but are often mistakenly used interchangebly. academic inst usually require a cv whereas most other jobs require a resume. submitting a cv when a co wants a resume may blow ur chances esp when there are lots of applicants to screen through.

you are splitting hairs here. don't be a twit. they may have semantically different meaning sin specialized fields like the academia, but for the majority of the industries, they are interchangeable.

Are you a bored grad student who is not making yourself gainfully employed?

Dude, people here are trying to get good paying jobs with their CVs / resumes. This is not an English class to discuss the subtile difference between the 2.

If you want to impress everyone with your English skills, go & start your own thread on the difference CV and resume and see how many people bother to reply.

From a neutral point of view, I believe that the majority of the people might use it interchangeably but it is still interesting to know that there might be this distinctive difference between CVs and Resumes.

On a side note, personally i feel CV should be kept short and sweet with important key words highlighting ur area of expertise of about 1-2 pages?

Some may debate that 1 pages is the standard but i think its ok to have 2 pages. While the 1st page contains all the necessary important attractive details that will appeal to the reader, making them wana flip to the 2nd page to read more?

Of coz if ur CV is 1 page sufficient, by all means stick to that.

Life is not always black and white...
 

I read with great amusement some of the arguments going on here.

Many fresh graduates are told that the resume is the single most important thing to make or break your employment offer simply because it's the first impression that your potential employer will have of you.

While some bosses do place a high emphasis on how well a resume is written and may make some judgment of your ability based on that, some like my former boss only look at the asking pay and age of the candidate before deciding if he wants to interview that fella.

In conclusion, how important a good resume is really depends on who is reading it on the other side. But as a job seeker, you of course will try to maximize your chances and write the best resume you can.

As for the difference, between a CV and a Resume… From personal experience, most of the time it doesn’t really matter unless you are debating this in a language class or you are applying for a job in some very specialized industry that somehow places great emphasis on your knowledge of the above difference.

All this talk about what is ideal resume, how many pages, how long the description, can put photo, different format etc etc is dumb. There is no ideal resume, every employer got different view of what is a good resume, you cannot please one without displeasing another.

Just write what you make sense and send to as many as possible. Interview is a numbers game, saying good resume will increase chance is useless because every employer definition of good is different.

While there is no such thing as an ideal resume, I have personally received some very very horrible ones that I binned straight away...

Some of the fatal ones I have received include,

1) Dishonest ones. One guy claimed to be a senior manager at 25, makes me wonder why the hell is he applying for a job with me. He should be headhunted everywhere he goes.

2) Teen Model Search ones. One lady posed in a kawaii manner complete with costume. I was recruting a sales rep not cosplay restaurant waitress.

3) The dunno what it's trying to say ones. One resume I received was 11 pages long. I actually glanced thru it briefly out of curiousity and couldn't make any sense of what the applicant was trying to tell me cos the whole thing had no organisation and sections at all!

hi husky,

I assume you are in the HR department.
Lets say a job opening in 24/6/2011 and end in 24/7/2011.
If i got a interview on these day of 24/6/2011. Do the HR wait untill
all candidate are interviewed and of 24/7/2011. they then select and finalised the chosen one.

Or in between, if the required manager that interview say this guy is ok. They then stop all interview process after 24/6/2022.

regards
david

Hi David,

I am not in HR. I just happen to head a small department in my company and had the opportunity to screen and hire a few staff.

Again, the interview/selection process varies from company to company. But I would say, typically the process stops once somebody suitable is found. Unless say, we are quite keen on the first candidate we interviewed but we have also arranged and finalised timings for a couple more within the same day or next few days. We will then just finish up the rest of the interviews just to be fair to the other candidates who have made arrangements to try and come down.

End of the day, we are all employees trying to finish our work and go home. :)

Definitely true! I've learned this from my husband as well. I'm never really fond of putting a lot in my CV, just the real score. And with the kind of technology nowadays, creating visual CV's are mostly getting much of the attention.

1) There is nothing wrong with being a Senior Manager at 25. It could be that his previous company has inflated titles, that doesn't mean he's lying. In a lot of companies these days we have people 27/28 already Vice President.

2) Agreed, but this is what I call common sense. There are of course some obvious stupid things one shouldn't do in CV, but I don't think TS was asking for a list of stupid things not to do in CV, rather he was asking for more concrete guidelines like length of CV, how much to describe each job, in what way should he describe his previous job and also detailed format etc. so this does not refute what I said earlier.

3) Yes, maybe the example you cited had poor clarity & was writing rubbish, but how does your example help in answering TS and others' queries on some broad principles in how to write a good CV? We have all seen bad CVs from 1 page to 30 pages, so what exactly is the lesson to be derived from your example? That we must write coherently? Again, I don't think this is what TS and others are asking.

I will reiterate again, there are obvious stupid things one shouldn't do in a CV, but beyond that, there is no such thing as concrete principles and guidelines on what constitutes a good CV. Every employer views such things differently.

Don't know anything just shut your trap and don't try to act like HR expert. Nobody can be a Senior Manager at age of 25 no matter how high flying you are, don't take us as idiots please.

Any experienced recruiter will tell you CV should be 4 pages max and you should always write achievements instead of what you do daily. You obviously never do recruitment before and now trying talk like an expert.

Notice I didn't even bother to reply him/her directly.:cool:

Sigh, I was just trying to be helpful and he/she had to shoot down my points one by one. But I guess there are people in life whose hobby is to put down other people. I pity his colleagues.

I am also interested in knowing, in your cv, do you state your education first, or your work experience first?

My situation is like this - I've been stuck in this job for 5 years already, and after speaking to some people they feel that I'm not being called for interviews because of this - the impression of stagnation in one place and not learning anything new for 5 years.

I'm doing a masters degree part time now, and some of them recommended placing this first in the cv, retitling it 'recent education', to show that there is some self-improvement actively taking place now.


Any comments on this? Should I do it?

since you have worked for 5Y, then the general rule of thumb is work experience first if you are applying for jobs in the same industry/field. if you are applying to a different field, and then master degree is relevant, then education can come first.

relevance is the general rule on what to put first.

I guess you just can't handle the truth. Unable to refute my points, you resort to personal attacks and speculating my personal hobby and give useless comments like you pity my colleagues.

If you don't know anything about recruitment then don't talk nonsense please. You yourself admit you no HR experience & only do a bit recruitment in small company here & there, you best learn to be humble before trying to be "helpful".

No, the general rule is should always put experience first no matter what if you are a mid career with working experience.

Trying to put your academic certs up first is usually a red flag for hirers because many people with a problematic career path (eg. job hopping, demotion etc.) always like to put their certs up first.

Maybe not fair to genuine people who have a good academic cert, but this is hiring reality.

Not true. Putting education first is the typical norm for MBA candidates with similar work experience. the person who asks the question is also doing a master, and if relevant, should put its education first.

5Y is hardly "mid-career"

Yes, I am so sorry... I will strive to learn from you humbly... :p

Correct me if I am wrong. But this is a forum... It's a place for discussions. I didn't address your points cos I felt they were basically pointless... If you have to insist that I address your points...

I believe this point has already been addressed by another forum user.


You think I thought... Look who's speculating? Again, let me repeat myself. This is a forum. I posted in hope that some people will find it helpful. If you don't you may ignore it.

And you think again... As you said, TS and others had some (in your own words) queries on broad principles in how to write a good CV. Giving a list of pitfalls to avoid would definitely help. Now if you would stop shooting yourself in your own foot.

Just passing by...
 

Are you new to forums? There are trolls in almost every forum that I visited. Singaporeans are just too free I think.

Telling people to shut up and ignore just because they criticize a poster is not a healthy way for discussion. While I agree with Husky's opinion on the CV matter, his replies that "I am trying to be helpful, so nobody should criticize me. If they dun like can shut up & ignore me" is an immature attitude.

We are here to trade and debate ideas, not to come here to listen to some guru preach and audience all nod head & clap in agreement - here not Singapore parliament hor.

Lets say if you have experience.

Do you put the job responsibilities first and then follow by your work accomplishment in your cv.

Or vice versa. work accomplishment and then job responsibilitiy.

Does it make any difference

If switching industry I suppose it's helpful to put responsibilities first to lay down the groundwork to help understanding the accomplishments?

-------------------

Reviving this thread just to ask whether it is any point listing a role which I've held only a week but got laid off due to redundancy. Reasons- address unemployment gap, showed that I successfully switched industry, expand skill set...