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You don't need to be Wordsworth - but it helps
You want to get to the point quickly. Don’t waste valuable seconds warming up with uninteresting information. Hit them hard with impressive achievements, valuable experience, notable projects or high-level tasks and examples of your work. Build someone’s desire to interview you.
You’ve got 60 seconds to sell yourself – no one reads the second page of someone’s CV if the first page fails to inspire any interest.
You are being interviewed for your experience with a number of key skills. What are your three most notable skills and what makes your experience impressive?
Make sure you include sufficient information – don’t leave any doubt. Underline your depth of knowledge – write about the things that make you stand out from the crowd.
Plan your CV – brainstorm the last 18 months of your career, list all the things that highlight you as a performer with plenty to bring in terms of value. What do you want someone to know about? What would impress you?
Bullet Points, Bolding, Text – what’s the happy balance?
CV’s that are entirely text or bullet point driven are missing the opportunity to break information up. The best CV’s feature a combination of both bullet points and text.
Too much text is tiring to read and leaves any page looking rather full and uninteresting. Those who use only bullet points miss the opportunity to show off their communication skills.
A nicely balanced CV containing a short series of well thought out bullet points that feature notable achievements and plenty of information-rich content, scores well for a number of reasons. Bullet points draw the eye quickly and give the reader a quick snapshot of your key selling points. Paragraphs of no more than four or five lines give the opportunity to detail your achievements and boast your communication skills.
Bolding is a nice addition to a CV but you must be restrained. Bold no more than two parts of your first page to make your points really stand out and make sure that you are drawing someone’s eye to experience that is genuinely interesting.
Bold too much text and the CV will not only look unattractive but you will lose impact. Bolding your most outstanding achievement is much better than bolding too many less impressive achievements. Imagine the reader is only going to look at your CV for twenty seconds – bold the part that says the most about you and what you can bring to a company.
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