cvservices.net : a better career : going deeper than ever

The recruitment climate has changed whilst the peddlers of clichés have been sleeping: almost everyone now faces merger and acquisition nightmares, redundancies, jobs not turning out as they were promised, periods out of work or in lesser jobs, career histories alternating between temporary and permanent assignments. Many people take time out or get so exhausted and stressed that they simply must make a dramatic career change to another sector.

Some people, faced with these problems, are turning to cheap and nasty CV writing bureaux or, worse still, to very expensive consultants who advertise in major broadsheet newspapers and claim to have a magic formula for accessing a mythical 'unadvertised job market'.

I have seen their work and it stinks. I have had heart-rending emails from people who have wasted over £3000 on more jobhunting tragedy. And the bulk of the ordinary misinformed CVs, over 95% of them, simply are not enough to present their owners as what I call a powerful candidate.

Major career change, like returning home from abroad or coming out of HM Forces, is another area where people make fools of themselves with ill-advised CV writing styles that try to deny the past. What could be more laughable than a Major in the Army describing himself as 'MD of a fast-moving SME' - and, believe me, I have seen this type of rubbish. And you have written it...

The Alternative

You can be a unique candidate with attractive professional assets, one who gets called to interview and then creates a new job or interim assignment from you skills. You can offer more than employers believe they want. You can deal with all this effectively if your CV is brilliantly conceived and written, which is what CVservices.net is dedicated to...

Further sections:
Grow Up and Understand the Market
CV Architecture
Professional Assets
The Narrative
Advice for Students & Graduates

Grow Up and Understand the Market

Recruiters earn their fees from employers, not candidates. In order to make money they have to persuade employers that they can locate good candidates who match requirements. This means that they have the difficult task of understanding the roles involved in a job and breaking them down into specific competencies (which is where the over-simplification starts to creep in).

Take a look at this fake job advert:

FAST GROWING SOLUTION PROVIDER
NEEDS
a versatile
MARKETING MANAGER

to spearhead our roll-out of new products both nationally and internationally.

The ideal candidate will have experience in business to business software sales and marketing, backed by a good depth of IT knowledge and proven skills in generating new business and managing key accounts.

Of at least graduate calibre, fully qualified, with at least 5 years experience in a marketing or branding role, other language ability would be an asset, as would dot.com experience and proven ability to research the marketplace for potential new clients.

This tells you about an image of what the recruiter believes the employer wants; it does not tell you about the reality of the job.

Perhaps they have an overworked Marketing Director who needs a new No 2 who can also manage the new website or who might take over direct marketing to free the Marketing Director to play on the Internet. Ideally they would like someone who can contribute to sales and promotion strategy and backstop the Sales Director when she is abroad. Enough knowledge of German to take that part of her role off her hands would be an alternative blessing and if they could find a candidate with SAP expertise to participate in any new proposition in that direction then they'd be delighted.

You as a candidate need to stop being a victim of these situations and start understanding them. You need to stop looking where everyone else looks and start identifying needs for your skills. You need to be marketing yourself.

CV Architecture

There are no rules about a CV should be, though you will find lots of so-called experts recommending various formats and you will find lots of useless templates in your WP application, created by techies in the USA - some years ago.

A CV should look like whatever it takes to get your particular case across. There are some conventions but there are no rules. Tinkering with the headings will not turn a limp CV into one that rings with professional confidence.

You can't achieve any worthwhile results by working to a format, throwing in some action words and having simplistic headings like 'Objectives', 'Achievements', 'Profile' or 'Skillsets'. These do not turn a naïve CV into an interview-winner.

You need to think about what sections deserve prominence, what messages you want to get across and what unspoken messages you want to plant in the mind of the reader. Done well, as I demonstrate in CV Sage, mastery of this process can produce what appear to be miracles.

Professional Assets

The main secret of this process is to scrap your dependence on some crude notion of what a result might be, better sales, more profit, extended growth, whatever...

...And to start thinking about what you as an individual have contributed to your work: the deeper process of your professional life, the value you have added in creative terms or in organisational shaping or financial controls - the intangible assets you have as a candidate. You derive these assets from creating a strong narrative, as explained below.

Every CV needs an introduction of some kind but most people spoil it with lists of stupid objectives or masses of clichés about their teamwork and communication skills. This is not a beauty contest.

To come across as a really powerful candidate you need to sound like a provider of solutions. Your professional assets should be briefly and tantalisingly showcased in a way that you will justify in the narrative section of your CV.

The Narrative

Narrative means story and some people think that means endless long sentences. You can still use bullet points but I am asking you to think of your most recent or most important career highlights in a context where you justify in action the claims you have made in the introduction to your CV.

Do not rely on the original person specification or your contract of employment - it is a fantasy. Do not focus only on things and figures. Think about the real situations, the intangibles, the issues, the background structures, the planning, the actions, the correction of problems and the working towards change and solution...

You need to make your career sound real. You need to sound like a valuable person who understands things and can cope. You need to show that you can manage process and generate vision. You need to develop the writing skills to illustrate yourself, as complex as you are….

All these topics are covered in much greater depth in the online CV writing program CV Sage... www.cvservices.net/alpha/cvsage/

Students and Graduates

For you the implication of all this is even more important. If you send in a monkey CV that apes what older people do and describes your time on the supermarket checkout as 'customer liaison' you simply read like a prat.

You need to show maturity, using all your assets, work and everything else - using them to paint a picture of potential and mature career choice that accepts your innocence of the world of work but nevertheless contains enough about your character and actions to be attractive to the employers who are looking for talent.

That is why I have created a completely new and unique CV methodology that is only for young people at First CV... http://www.cvservices.net/alpha/cvsage/cvsage2.asp

These topics are covered in greater depth in CV Sage with examples and exercises.
Take a look!