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Candidates - CV Writing

Is your CV a yes, no, or a maybe?

The manager recruiting for the position you've applied for will be faced with an enormous pile of CVs, which will put into 3 piles; yes interview, no reject, and maybe come back to later if the yes pile fails to deliver.

For your CV to be put into the yes pile it must very clearly state the skills you have to offer.  It's important to remember that we're talking about technical recruitment and our clients therefore want to see technical skills. The recruiting manager may have only a matter of seconds to initially scan your CV, so the skills must be immediately apparent. How can you achieve this?

• Put the technical skills in bold. Simple, but immensely effective.
• Use bullet points to draw the readers eye to the important area of your CV. 
• Put the most relevant experience first.
  

The most effective way to demonstrate technical skills is to provide a breakdown of the projects you've worked on. Remember that a project should comprise the following pieces of information:

• Title Timescales 
• Number of staff involved 
• Technology used 
• Technology you used 
• Your role
• What you actually did
• Sell yourself

Writing I was an Analyst Programmer does not do you justice. Far more effective is:

Accounting Project - 6 months, team of 5

I worked as a Developer on a complete rewrite of an accounting application. The software was written in VB6 with a SQL Server database using an ODBC and linked to a back end Mainframe running MVS.

My role required me to speak to users covering initial requirements and then design the screens. I also talked to the database designer regarding the Entity Relationship Diagram and became involved in writing SQL stored procedures. The majority of my time was spent coding in VB5 using AD02 and I also gained exposure to COM and DCOM. The last month of the project was spent testing the software using SQA Teamtest. 

Providing this type of breakdown for 3 projects you've been involved in will ensure that you submit a CV that tells the reader exactly what you did. If what youve done is what the reader wants, then your CV will be put into the yes pile.

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