Hey Recruiter, How Good is Your CV?
As recruiters, you spend a lot of time reading through other people’s CVs, yet how long has it been since you turned your professional eye to your own CV?
In the current job market many recruiters are considering moving companies— whether for promotion, salary increase or just a change. Even passive jobseekers never know if they might be approached with an offer out of the blue. Therefore, whether you’re actively looking or not, it’s vital to have an up-to-date and powerfully impressive CV that you can submit at a moment’s notice.
It might seem easy to write a stellar CV considering you have so much experience in reading them, yet anyone who has sat down to write their CV knows that it’s a difficult job to make all your achievements jump off the page without sounding boastful or missing something out, or how to skim over any long gaps in employment without raising a red flag.
Remember, a recruiter’s CV is even more closely scrutinised than normal, because the hirer needs to know that you can spot a good CV from a bad one! In your recruitment role you’ll need to advise candidates on how to improve their CV-from length to grammar mistakes to highlighting key information—so you need to make sure that your CV is spot on if you’re hoping to secure an interview.
How to give your recruitment CV an overhaul
Above all, if you’ve already got recruitment experience, you must demonstrate your past results loud and clear. As such, make sure that you detail how many placements, what fee level, how many new clients you’ve brought in, and how often you hit and exceed company or personal targets. If you’re new to recruitment, you need to pull out anything relevant to recruitment and make that shine on your CV (such as any sales experience, networking ability, a good phone manner or IT and social media skills.)
Don’t be tempted to just add your current role onto your old CV and submit it to new opportunities! That’s a common mistake that fails to take advantage of all the new things you’ve learnt since your last job-hunting experience- including the new trends when it comes to CVs, cover letters and the job market. As a recruiter, you’re definitely in the know about trends in the recruitment market, so use this specialist knowledge to your advantage.
If you can, rewrite your CV from scratch- the first time do it without looking at the old version, and then compare. You’ll certainly want to update it with links to your online profile and any blogs or articles that you’ve published for your firm or on LinkedIn. Remember to keep it to 2 pages- 3 at the maximum. You may need to start culling information from early roles or irrelevant school awards.
Rewriting your CV from scratch is also a great opportunity to look back on past roles and see how they prepared you for both the role you are in now, and the role you’re hoping to get. When we leave a job it’s initially hard to get the distance and perspective we need to realise how helpful that job was in our career progression. So take this time now to look back and get a more holistic view.
As you no doubt know, a touch of personality is important in a CV, but it’s also important to cherry-pick the personal information you include in order to increase your chances of securing an interview. For example, if you include your sporting and volunteering experience in your hobbies & interests section, that lends a powerful message that you are good at teamwork and engaging with others- which is excellent for a recruiter. Be savvy about what you choose to include. Remember that everything you put on your CV is selected purely to increase your chances of getting a job, so be wary of sharing any overly personal or irrelevant information.
Your CV needs to have personality, yet it also needs to make your achievements ring loud and clear. For a recruiter, there are no excuses for not getting a CV right.
Until next time,
Cheryl