Tips on Getting Your CV Through the Door

Fact: the best candidate may never get the best job.

One thing I always see recurring throughout my career is how some CVs wrongly project the candidate. It is sad when people invest so much time getting good grades in school or build track records that is expected to thrust their careers and after all that effort, their fate is tied to a badly written CVs that gets thrashed within seconds.

To make this clearer, consider an example, using two candidates (A and B) that work in the same firm with the same benchmark. For the sake of this write-up, let’s say employee “A” in a high performer (who always over-perform his targets) and employee “B” is an average performer (who never meets his targets). Who would you recommend to be called for a chat if you had only one option?

Candidate A (performed 130% of target):

Experience: Sales and Marketing Manager

Summary: Identifies business opportunities by identifying prospects and evaluating their position in the industry; researching and analysing sales options.

Candidate B (performed 75% of target):

Experience: Sales and Marketing Manager

Summary: Part of a team that sold more than 20million units of XYZ product in 2015

I would recommend Candidate “B” because it would be interesting to find out more about how he sold 20million units. Eventually, I may not follow through on the recruitment but at least he got the chance to impress me. Employee “A” may be called in but it is mostly based on chance or abundance of time on the part of the employer or because no else applied. You will be amazed how most top companies end up with a lot of average performers due to this misinformation from candidates.

When your CV is thrown into a pool of 1,000 qualified candidates, and the employer only had to sieve through to understand, the little things count. I employed a candidate recently that blew everyone in the interview panel away. Before then, when I got the CV, I literally thrashed it and informed HR not to call him in. Fortunately for me, he had already been called before the HR associate read my email. This candidate was amazing during the interview but judging by his CV, I would have thrashed it again if we had to go through the process all over.

When I started out looking for jobs, I didn’t have the best of grades, neither did I go to the best of schools but I wrote a good CV and for most of the time I had to send it out, I was given a chance to impress.

Here are some tips on how to ensure your CV always make it through the sieving

Ground rule: employers hardly read half the things you put on your CV. Two things matter to me when I am recruiting: first is the candidate’s education; second is what he does currently. If none of those two interest me, I won’t read anything further.

Find a punch line: when I receive a CV from a candidate saying he is an analyst, I know for sure that he will be involved in analysing data. I know the sales representative will be sourcing deals. So it is irrelevant saying that in your CV. Employers employ not because of what you do currently but because of what you have done. They are interested in the values you bring to the table. It is important you can say this in a direct and short sentence like Candidate B above. In general, try as much as possible to modify your CV to suit the role you are applying for.

When a CV is longer than 2 pages, more than 60% of the information in it is irrelevant.

Spellings and other mistakes are a big NO. It is the easiest way to kill a good CV so proof your CV before sending it to any employer

Unless cover letters are required, DON’T send it. No one reads them unless they are trying to judge how you express yourself (but that is just my opinion)

Stay away from blank emails. A lot of time, I get CVs from candidates who just forward you CVs that they had forwarded to 100 other employers without any message in it. Or just a blank email with a CV attached. Not even an FYI. This is quite unprofessional and may be counterproductive.

Get a professional email: a lot of us opened emails a long time ago and may have used some slang or a nickname that projects our image then. As much as you can try, get new emails to put on your CV. These sorts of emails IDs (such as sexy1267@xyz.com) may hurt you so stay away from them.

Overall, the important factor is for you to project yourself as an interesting person that the employer would like to meet. Like any good presentation, you have to keep your employer wanting to know more about what you have on your CV. Think of your CV as the back cover of a novel written about you; if it is interesting enough to make people want more, they will buy the book and read. If they get disinterested, they only have two choices: read the book because there is no other book to read or drop it and leave. Don’t be the candidate that was called in just because there was no one else to call or the candidate that was dropped without a chance.

Next: I will be writing on how to ace any interview and get the job 100% of the time.

Written By Amida Olayode Azeez
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