The best CV recipe to win interviews
You worked hard at school to get into university, studied for your degree and then gained professional work experience; now, you would like to get your dream job here in the UK. This is the ideal time to start making your CV work for you.
Examples and templates are easy to find online, but it is hard to know which one to follow or trust. At Onpartu, we enlisted coach and trainer Gosia Sztandera with 10 years of recruitment experience to co-create and host a video series for foreign-born professionals, and this blog post is your key to her insights.
Continuous Work-In-Progress
Correctly following the guidelines and advice below means that you will never complete your perfect CV. This is because for every job role you should have a separate tailored resume, and this is your best chance at succeeding. Be prepared therefore to have an open copy of your CV at hand and not get attached to a final draft, but edit it according to each job description. If that sounds like a lot of work, focus on tailoring five CVs rather than sending out one copy to 100 firms, and let us know how you got on – we are hear to help!
Keep It Short
Now that you are ready to adapt your CV to every role, familiarise yourself with the guidelines of the UK job market. This means cutting out personal details such as your age, home address or marital status if you are used to including them; definitely delete that photo. Doing all of these creates valuable space for listing the skills relevant to your dream role.
Gosia also highly recommends restricting yourself to a maximum of two A4 sides of content. How do you do that? Rather than treating your CV as a chronological autobiography, select professional experience relevant to your application and save some detail for later. The general rule is to cut out experience older than 15 years.
Practical Advice
Make sure that every step of the presentation of your CV is as professional as your work experience, starting with the most recent items first and with:
Using 4-5 concise bullet points per job role;
Showing the statistical results of your actions, such as “increased revenue by 20%";
Creating a new professionally sounding e-mail address if needed;
And converting the file into a PDF and saving it under a clear title, such as ‘Name_Surname_CV’;
Remember that the main purpose of your CV is to win you an interview invitation rather than the job offer itself. The conversation is where you can show that there is even more to you than what is on the page.
Sign up to our free CV course
What to expect:
Access to an e-Learning course;
Onpartu style training including templates and a checklist;
Real life examples;
And an exclusive invitation to a face-to-face session upon completion.
You can register via our homepage here.
