Building your CV or Resume: The Short Way to Standing Out
Having a well-prepared CV is the first step to building your professional foundation. It serves as a way for people to quickly get to know you and your professional accomplishments, and more importantly, to get to know what you can do to help elevate their business. In today’s competitive job market, employers look beyond a simple line of experience that you put on your CV: They’re looking for that one individual that stands out from the crowd, and with this short guide, you will be one step closer to being that individual.
The obvious: Your CV or Resume are the first, and perhaps only chance, of leaving an impression on your future employer, which means that your resume should ALWAYS be individualized to each specific role and employer. If you apply to a hundred jobs, it means you should have 100 CVs or Resumes; but more than that, the point of all of this effort is not just to highlight your skills; it’s to bring an added value to the company you’re applying.
The not-so-obvious: In practice, two key things you should focus on are your CVs formatting and the way you communicate yourself through written English. For the latter, you need to make two distinctions: writing about your present experience, if existent, and writing about your past experience.
For example: Let’s say you are working for a company that offers worldwide Marketing & Sales Services, and one of your responsibilities is Lead Generation and Management. A core responsibility of this job description is to identify and qualify leads. Instead of describing what you do, offer a further explanation that adds value to doing this job.
Present tense with added value (if currently employed):
Identifying quality leads and maintaining positive relationships through personalized communications, resulting in an increase in lead conversion rates by 18%
Past tense with added value (if formerly employed):
Identified quality leads and maintained strong relationships through personalized communications that increased lead conversion rates by 18%
Having a well-formatted CV
There is no easy way to say this, but here goes: CONVERT YOUR DOCUMENTS TO PDF!
In our experience, about 20% of the CVs or Resumes we receive are in the wrong format: we’ve seen word documents, pictures of CVs written in word, links to both these formats, or even texts written inside the email (at least they used bullet points though!).
There is a very easy work-around for this with our next pro tip!
Pro Tip Numero Uno: You may use a resume builder or cv maker such as Europass, which is the most acceptable format in Europe, or scour the internet for resume examples before you decide on the best example to follow on your job search.
Networking And Expanding Your Knowledge Base
Most people tend to overlook the power of networking, or professional socializing, as we like to call it sometimes. One of the reasons for this is that potential candidates in the professional world tend to overlook the fact that an employer does not just want your professional value but personal value as well. What this means is that most employers and most companies are looking for someone who can bring value not just with the professional experience but personal experience as well; they want someone who is open-minded, motivated, and naturally a good person to be around in both a professional and personal setting.
The obvious: Networking in today’s world is done digitally, and if there is one place that makes the best out of matching the personal and professional, it’s LinkedIn. It really is the equivalent of the term we referred to just earlier: Professional Socializing. So, your next step is to start populating your page with content and start sharing posts about things that interest you.
The not-so-obvious: Often times in LinkedIn you’ll get a message inviting you to apply for a job somewhere, but sometimes it’s not the right person writing and you really want it to be another company. Well, this is where you can help yourself by populating your profile and CV with the appropriate keywords, also referred to as Personal SEO (Yep, it works).
Pro Tip Number Two: If you’re looking to expand your knowledge about any job, it’s highly likely that you will find courses about it all over the internet. One of our favorite places to learn is LinkedIn, more specifically their Learning platform. Remember that it never hurts to know more than you need to, because when all is said and done, this is an added value to your own self and then to a company. No one can take experience away from you!
The Personal SEO Example:
Let’s say you are looking to work as a Virtual Assistant, either remotely or in an office. When you start researching the key responsibilities of being a VA and because this is most times a very broad search, you might get results like customer relationship management, email management, administrative support and so on, but in other cases you will also get responsibilities like social media management, market research, or even SEO research.
For the sake of the argument, let’s focus on a particular set of skills: Administrative Support.
Now, both your CV and your LinkedIn profile (consider the latter your digital CV) should include keywords about administrative support.
A quick search on the internet (or a quick look at our VA Services) reveals that keywords like data entry, document prep, VR services and admin management are most associated with admin support and VAs, and the same should be included naturally in both your CV and LinkedIn profile. Now, when you combine those keywords with the added value we talked about earlier, your CV might be looking something like this:
Organized Data Entries into an Airtable (or Excel Sheet, or Google Sheet) that doubled the team’s efficiency in verifying entries.
Updated team processes that resulted in faster document preparation for potential clients.
Created and managed incoming emails into several sections and distributed them to different teams, which in turn increased the reply rate from 50 emails to 80 emails per day.
When you combine the keywords used in the job that you want to get, together with the value you add to the company, it makes your profile easier to find and helps recruiters or employers focus on what matters most: the value you bring to your potential future employer. With that said, we hope this guide has helped you even a little bit toward making your professional life more visible to your future employer or potential recruitment agencies.
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