CV Crime Watch - 3 common CV crimes and how to avoid them

We’ve been looking at a LOT of CVs lately and no matter how senior the person, the same CV crimes keep popping up. Let’s face it, it’s always smart to keep your CV current, so check out how to avoid common pitfalls. Think of us as your CV equivalent of Neighbourhood Watch!

CV Crime #1 - Squandering first page real estate

The first page of your CV is prime real estate. Time and time again, we see people filling their first page with stuff that is of secondary importance to the reader - career summaries, interests, unnecessary descriptors for competencies.

Your reader wants to quickly see that you have what it takes to do the job without having to trawl your cv to hunt this out. 

In a nutshell, they need to get a sense of you and what you offer from your personal profile; your core skills (especially ones they’re looking for in the role) and your current or most recent work experience.

Here’s a quick list of Dos and Don’ts for your first page

Contact details

DO include your contact details and keep them tight - your name; email; contact number and a link to your LinkedIn address if you have one. 

DON’T include your physical address. They’re not going to visit you!

DON’T include a photo. You are potentially opening yourself up to unconscious bias, before you’ve even shown up to the interview.

Personal profile

DO include one. The purpose of this is to hook their attention and sell the heck out of you!

DO tweak it for the job you’re applying for

DO keep it to one or two paragraphs

DO give them a sense of the scope of your experiences e.g. “..in fast-paced, agile scale ups through to larger ($200m+) organisations, managing teams of up to 75 people… Responsible for generating $100m in revenue…”

DO give them a sense of what is important to you, if you’re clear about that e.g. “I’m happiest when I see people thriving. I love to grow people and know we’re delivering value to customers”. Ensure it makes sense for the role you’re applying for.

DON’T fill it with cliches and general descriptors like ‘great communicator’, or skills the reader could safely assume you have. Your CV should speak to the quality of your written communication and they’ll assess your verbal communication in an interview.

Core Skills

Do list up to eight of your key transferable skills and strengths. Bullet points are fine

Do include some of the skills they have specified in the job ad or job description (but only if you have them!) and reflect the language they have used.

Don’t list more than eight as it makes for a tedious read

Don’t feel the need to describe the skill. Your skills and strengths should be demonstrated in your work experience achievements.

Most recent work experience

DO include the organisation, job title, location and start and end months

DO give them a sense of the scope of responsibilities of the role in a couple of sentences. Write it like you are telling someone at a bbq.

DO include what you achieved in the role, using the STAR framework (Situation/Task; Action; Result). We often see a description of the Situation/Task, and the Result. The reader wants to understand how you approached the problem (how you think and act) so don’t leave out the all-important ACTION!

DO ensure those achievements demonstrate some of the competencies they are looking for in the role.

DON’T include a laundry list of responsibilities, especially if they are commonly expected in the role. Most people would assume a Marketing Manager manages marketing campaigns!

Career snapshot

DON’T have one! A career snapshot or summary is nothing more than a list of job titles and doesn’t demonstrate to the reader you have the experience or competencies to do the job they are hiring for. At best, it may show you’ve worked for some great organisations but typically it takes up a lot of space and doesn’t provide that engaging hook.

CV Crime #2 - The impenetrable wall of words

“I love reading a page crammed full of size 10 font”, said no person ever! And yet so many CVs resemble a wall of words. It is unappealing and can be overwhelming for the reader.

If you’ve committed this CV crime, we get it! There is so much to say, especially if you’ve been working for a while. 

The trouble is, according to Bard, (Google’s new AI tool), the average attention span for reading content these days is 8 seconds! That’s not long to get your key messages across. 

Two ways to engage your readers for longer are 1) ensure your content is well written and engaging and 2) create rest breaks for the readers’ eyes and mind. That means creating plenty of white space. And to add to your challenge, we recommend keeping your CV to two or three pages maximum.

How to create white space, keep your CV to 3 pages AND tell them what they need to know?

Firstly only include the last 10 years of work experience. Typically, anything after that feels too long ago to be relevant to the role you’re applying for now.

Secondly, resist the urge to faithfully describe all the responsibilities of each role you’ve had in the last 10 years.  Repeating the same experiences or skills from role to role takes up a lot of space. Remember your CV is a proof point you have the capabilities required for the role you’re going for. Once you’ve proven that skill or competency in one role, it doesn’t matter that you’ve done it for three others. Be strategic and choose different, relevant skills or experiences to highlight in each role.

Thirdly, write each achievement or experience using the STAR framework (Situation/Task, Action and Result) then have a go at reducing the word count without losing meaning. If you struggle with this, give it to someone else to have a go for you.

CV Crime #3 - the shopping list of key responsibilities and achievements

You may think one way to keep your CV tight is to provide bullet point lists of your responsibilities for each role. We really don’t think that is the way to go. 

We’re most certainly not against bullet points. They’re useful little suckers. What we are against is seeing your responsibilities and achievements presented like a shopping list as with this CV example we reviewed recently. 

Responsibilities:

• People, Resource and Budget Management

• Administration Services Management

• Policy Servicing Management

• Customer Retention 

• Develop and manage policies and procedures for end user documentation

• Communicate identified issues to the relevant stakeholders

Which sort of resembles:

Shopping list:

• Washing powder - environmentally friendly brand

• Milk

• Red wine - the Barossa Valley one (but only if it’s on special)

• Bananas

• Brown rice

• You get the idea!

The problem with these lists is the lack of  context to help the reader understand the level of difficulty; the size of the challenge; the span of control or scope of your responsibilities or achievements. 

This approach is effectively hiding your bright, shining light under a bushel, as was the case for the owner of the CV offered up for sacrifice. This person is a highly capable and successful senior manager, who, I am thrilled to say, now has a completely transformed CV.

When summarising your responsibilities, firstly, be sparing with listing responsibilities that most readers would simply assume are part of the role. Secondly, we strongly suggest including information like the size of the team, annual sales or revenue growth, opex or capex responsibilities, state of the market/industry etc so that readers can understand the environment in which you were operating.  

Here are a few hypothetical examples

• within xx months, turned around a declining sales trend, in a fiercely competitive category, growing xx% for xx period, by primarily concentrating on xxx and xxx.

• inherited a portfolio of 50 clients with an NPS score of 28 and took xx action to understand the issues.  Made xxx changes and worked with yyy to improve xx. This resulted in a NPS rise to 52 within 12 months.

• Identified xx issue with xx process that caused product failures and unhappy customers. Developed and costed a solution to reduce product failures by xx%. Presented the business case to management and was given approval to lead the improvement project. Delivered within budget, and exceeded our quality improvement target by xx%

What you might have picked up from these examples, is not only are you giving context, it tells a little bit of a story, which is more enjoyable to read, and you’re also demonstrating competencies. In the examples above commercial acumen; customer orientation; process improvement; collaboration are some of the competencies being demonstrated. 

PRO TIP: If you have listed a strength or competency in your summary at the top of your CV, it’s a smart idea to include an example of each somewhere in your work experience section. 

It’s worth reiterating, from our CV Crime # , there is no need to repeat the same experiences or skills from role to role. When you tell more of a story, it takes up a lot more space. So you need to be strategic and choose different, relevant skills or experiences to highlight in each role. Your CV is a proof point you have the capabilities required for the role you’re going for. Once you’ve proven that skill or competency in one role, it doesn’t matter that you’ve done it for three others. 

That’s it from the CV CrimeWatch team today. We’ll be scanning the airwaves for other CV crimes so watch out for future articles.

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