Ultimate CV

Master the Art of Creating a Winning CV with Over 100 Samples to Help You Get the Job

Martin John Yate

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780749474546
• eBook ISBN:
  9780749481520
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Does your CV have the X factor? Do you want your CV to impress potential employers and show them exactly what they want? Ultimate CV, now in its 5th edition and part of the successful Ultimate series, provides you with the key guidance you need to create an irresistible CV that will grab any recruiter's attention. This book will help you to stand out from other candidates, open doors to job interviews and maximize the potential for job offers. Careers and CV guru Martin John Yate shows you how to position plain facts into a powerful sales pitch that will get you the job you want.

Ultimate CV covers every aspect of this crucial part of the job-hunting process. It contains hundreds of sample CVs, tailored to specific jobs and industries, that you can use and personalize for your own applications. Alongside insightful advice on hunting for jobs, this indispensable book will give you all the guidance you need to create a distinctive, professional CV so you can get that dream job.

About the Ultimate series...
The Ultimate series contains practical advice on essential job search skills to give you the best chance of getting the job you want. Taking you all the way from starting your job search to completing an interview, it includes guidance on CV or résumé and cover letter writing, practice questions for passing aptitude, psychometric and other employment tests, and reliable advice for interviewing.

1

YOUR CV – THE MOST FINANCIALLY IMPORTANT DOCUMENT YOU’LL EVER HAVE

Read this book with a highlighter – it will save time as you refer back to important passages.

Your CV is the most financially significant document you will ever have. When it works, the doors of opportunity open for you. When it doesn’t work, they won’t.

No one enjoys writing a CV, but it has such a major impact on the money you earn during your working life, and consequently on the quality of your life outside of work, that you know it needs to be done properly.

You didn’t come to this book for a good read. You came because you are facing serious challenges in your professional life. The way the professional world works has changed dramatically in the past few years, and nothing has changed as much as recruitment. When employment practices have changed beyond recognition, your approach to getting hired needs to be re-evaluated from top to bottom.

In these pages, you are going to learn very quickly how to build a CV that works. But you’re going to learn something more. Since my approach to CVs is part of a larger strategy for achieving long-term career and personal success, everything I teach you about developing a brilliant CV will apply to the broader challenges of the job search, interviewing, and career management.

In other words, not only will you leave this book with a CV, you’ll leave it with critical job search and interview strategies, and even some amazing insights into winning raises and promotions.

Self-awareness: the key to professional survival and success

Understanding what employers want and need from a specific job, and how they express and prioritize those needs, will tell you what it takes to succeed in that job. It will also give you some hints about the story your CV needs to tell in order to get your foot in the door.

Employers just want to make money

Employees only get added to the payroll to enhance profitability in some way. Think about this: if you owned a company, there just isn’t any other reason you would add workers to your payroll. So it is implicit in any employment contract that your job contributes to profitability in some way.

Depending on your job, you can help an employer by:

• Making money for the company
• Saving money for the company
• Saving time/increasing productivity

No matter what your job, no matter how impressive your title, at its very core, your position exists to help an employer maintain and increase profitability by:

• The identification of problems within your area of responsibility
• The prevention of problems within your area of responsibility
• The solution to problems within your area of responsibility

No CV gets read, no one gets interviewed, and no one gets hired unless someone somewhere is trying to solve a problem. That problem may be finding a quicker way to manufacture silicon chips, speed up the accounts receivable process, use social networking for brand management, or any one of a million other profit challenges.

The only reason your job exists is because your employer needed someone to identify, prevent, and solve the problems that regularly occur; it exists because not having someone like you is costing the company money.

Problem solving – the application of analytical thinking to the challenges within your area of expertise – is what you are paid to do. It is why every job opening exists, and why every job gets filled with the person who seems to have the firmest grip on how to identify, prevent, and solve the problems that make up the everyday activities of that job.

No one reads CVs unless they have to, so when your CV does get read, it means that a job exists: a job that has been carefully defined, budgeted, and titled, with a salary range that has been authorized and for which funds have been released. Whenever an employer searches a CV database or reads a CV, she is doing it with a specific job and the language and priorities of that job description in mind.

Why an employer may never get the chance to read your CV

The ongoing impact of technology on our world of work causes the nature of all jobs to change almost as rapidly as the pages on a calendar. CVs today rarely go straight to a manager’s desk (though I’ll show you how to make this happen); more often they go to a CV database.

This means that before anyone actually looks at your CV, it must first have been pulled from that database by a recruiter with a specific job and the language and priorities of that job description in mind. Keep in mind that some of those databases contain millions of CVs.

With this in mind, you can see that if your CV’s just a jumble of everything you’ve ever done, or of everything that you happen to think is important (without reference to what your customers actually want), it is never going to work.

Understand your customer

“The customer is always right,” “the customer comes first,” and “understand your customer” are phrases that underlie all successful business stories. In the same way that companies tailor products to be appealing to their customers, you need to create a CV tailored to your customers’ needs.

Your CV works when it matches your skills and experiences to the responsibilities of a specific target job. This requires that your CV focuses on how employers – your customers – think about, prioritize, and describe the job’s deliverables: those things you are expected to deliver as you execute your assigned responsibilities.

A CV focused on a specific target job and built from the ground up with the customers’ needs in mind will perform better in database searches, and it will resonate far more with human eyes.

This is not your last job change

In a world without job security, when job and even career changes are happening ever more frequently, being able to write a productive CV is one of life’s critical survival skills.

This is probably not your first, and almost certainly won’t be your last, job change. You are somewhere in the middle of a half-century work life, a span during which you are likely to have three or more distinct careers and are statistically likely to change jobs about every four years; where economic recessions come around every seven to ten years and age discrimination can begin to kick in around the age of fifty.

2

YOUR CUSTOMER KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS – HOW TO GET INSIDE HIS HEAD

“The customer is always right” is probably the first business lesson we ever learn. The customer knows exactly what he wants and when you accurately tailor your product to your customer’s needs, you’ll experience a success. This chapter is about how to customize your CV to your customers’ needs.

Your CV is the primary marketing device for every job and career change throughout your career. In addition, it plays a role in subsequent internal promotions. In short, it is absolutely vital in determining your professional success. Yet when it comes to creating a CV, no one ever seems to think about what the customer wants! Instead, we just want to get it done as quickly as possible and with as lit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Your CV – The Most Financially Important Document You’ll Ever Have
• 2 Your Customer Knows What He Wants – How to Get Inside His Head
• 3 How to Define and Build a Desirable Professional Image
• 4 The Simplest, Smartest, Fastest Way to Write Your CV – Keep It Simple
• 5 How to Give Your CV Punch
• 6 CV Customization, Alternative CVs and Formats Needed for an Effective Job Search
• 7 Ready to Launch
• 8 The CVs
• Index
• Backcover