JOB NEWS from PERFECT CVs
	What is wrong with my CV is the most common question asked of our Customer Support Team

If you look on Google you will find there have been something over 60M queries on the theme of needing help with CVs or finding out what is wrong with a CV. To put this into perspective 297M queries are concerned with help with I phones!!

It is not surprising then that the question “What is Wrong with My CV?” is just about the most common we get asked in our capacity as providing support and advice. The issue spans market sectors and virtually all levels of seniority and our experience has been that the worst examples are mid level candidates in sectors such as marketing, banking & finance, retail and sales. Given the interactivity involved in these sectors, poor quality CVs wouldn’t perhaps be so prevalent.

There is tons of stuff on the web about how to write a CV, some of it good and a lot of it confusing which doesn’t help the candidate but at least the basics come across, so I am not going to go over old ground here. We have identified a few of the fundamental problems with self produced CVs.

The first issue is getting the CV in front of a recruiter in the first place. The fact of the matter is that when recruiters search CV databases or scan (with software) submitted CVs they use keywords relevant to the vacancy and hiring organization, just like you would search on Google. If the CV doesn’t contain sufficient “matches” then the recruiter will never know the candidate exists. The keywords used are not obvious as they are selected to find candidates with specific skills and often specific competencies that match the core competency profiles defined by many organizations.

It is extremely difficult for anyone whose expertise is in any area other than recruitment and related services to identify relevant keywords and build them into a CV without making it unreadable and looking like a spam document. It requires deep experience of how recruiters work in each industry sector.

But lets assume this particular hurdle has been overcome, maybe the candidate has written a superlative application letter which is one way of circumventing technology with some recruiters. The next problem is what we call “the 20 second test”. Recruiters or sometimes their researchers speed read CVs and if in the first 20 seconds, they do not see a clear reason to hire, the CV ends up in the reject pile. We have quantified the 20 second test and find that most self produced CVs score less than 50% of that required to encourage a recruiter to read more thoroughly. Unfair you may cry, well not really – the recruiter is seeking the best for his client and experience shows that those that deliver strong, unambiguous and on-song messages make the best employees. Like the keyword situation, it takes a lot of experience and skill to deliver the correct level of message for a particular type of role and again it’s is hard for an individual to do this.

The third issue is to do with content. A huge proportion of CVs are written from the perspective of the candidate; after all, the candidate knows what he or she has done and where etc. Self produced CVs are generally not written as selling documents that tell a recruiter what the value of the candidate is to a hiring organization. Without this vital information the CV ends up in the reject pile even if the candidate would in fact be a great fit for the vacancy. Writing a selling document requires objectivity. How many of us can honestly say we can be totally objective about ourselves? – hence the problem. Candidates need a professional to provide the objectivity.

It’s the lack of objectivity that is the main problem with the CVs of more senior professionals. When we report this fact after reviewing existing CVs we are often met with incredulity but it’s easy to prove our point. If applications made with a CV are not resulting in at the very least 25% invitations to interview, there is something wrong with the CV; we change the CV and bingo, our point becomes accepted.

I could go on: how to describe achievements, how to layout the CV, how to handle problem issues or non work periods, what to leave out etc, etc – maybe another time, there is something more important to say.

Who knows what happened when the fax machine was introduced, when email was introduced, when on line networks were born? The mechanism of delivery of the message attached a greater “status” to the message and allowed inclusion of information in a different manner. In today’s recruitment worldr, e CVs or Personal Mini Profiles – are the modern method of selling to recruiters. As the name implies these are web hosted “profiles”, indexed by search engines allowing direct selling of a candidate to a recruiter. Further because of web and page construction instant appeal can be gained from the “home” page with supporting information accessed at the recruiter’s discretion via normal website navigation. This is particularly helpful for some candidates. Marketeers can e.g. show pictures that sell their creativity, consultants can substantiate their capabilities with case studies, candidates in media can showcase career highlights etc etc. Add to this the effect that design, images logos etc can have and you might say that this delivery mechanism gives the candidate an unfair advantage.

Fully designed, hosted and managed mini webs (microsites) mean that the candidate doesn’t have to worry about the technical stuff and the webs can be very easily updated to reflect changing requirements. Since the recruitment world went on line, vacancy visibility for the candidate improved enormously but so did the competition. Personal mini webs changes all that – at least for the time being

Julie French

	from Brian on 3rd Feb	I am an electrical engineer, how would an e-CV benefit me?
	reply from Julie French	e-CVs are becoming popular with both applicants and recruiters. One way they are being used is by candidates applying directly to Companies for which they wish to work with a letter or email providing the link to their e-CV. This is proving more productive than the conventional speculative letter with a CV attached and we suspect might be due to novelty value. An e-CV may therefore help you with direct applications if you can identify appropriate Companies; always address your letter / email to a named individual, never to just the HR Department or Dear Sir. Other than this it is doubtful if an e-CV would help secure new work via agencies and we would suggest concentrating on a really powerful written CV for these applications.