Personal Finance | Interview Answers | Winning CVs | Beat the Recession

CV Tips

Inside information on how to produce a tailor-made CV for each application.

Applying for jobs was different back in the 1980s. I remember one job-hunting phase where I sat at home listening to Frankie Goes to Hollywood while scouring the papers and cutting out any appealing job adverts.

Every time I found one, I'd take a CV from my pile of photocopies, pop it in an envelope, address the envelope, add a stamp and voilà - application to go. I used to time myself doing this; my unratified record was thirty-seven seconds.

To be fair, that particular approach was partly a product of the technology available back then. Changing your CV was a bit of a palaver, which typically involved gaining access to somebody with a manual typewriter or (if you were lucky) an early word processor the size of a fridge-freezer and trying to charm them into spending an hour of their time helping you to produce a new version.

These days, of course, pretty much everybody has access to a PC - almost certainly at work and probably at home - and so revising our CVs ought not to be beyond our wit and technological powers. This is just as well because just as the world has moved on since the 1980s, not to mention my musical taste, employers' expectations about the quality of CVs have risen sharply.

Nowadays, a CV isn't simply a statement of career experience to date, but a marketing document. And not just an ordinary marketing document either, but a one-to-one marketing document. What this means is that your CV needs to be customised to each and every job you apply for. To put it bluntly, if you're not producing a customised document every time your CV goes out, you're significantly reducing the likelihood of getting an interview.

Two key questions you need to ask yourself every time you put pen to paper are:

What does the organisation with the vacancy want?
What do I have to offer that matches what the organisation is looking for?

To take each in turn:

WHAT DOES THE ORGANISATION WITH THE VACANCY WANT?

This is fairly straightforward when the vacancy is advertised because all the information you need should be in the advertisement or contained in an information pack that the organisation will send you if you express an interest.

Where you've heard of the vacancy through the grapevine and there isn't a formal advertisement as such, you can still make an intelligent guess at the qualities required. If you can back that up with a chat with somebody who might give you some inside information on the vacancy, so much the better. Best of all, simply ring the manager with the vacancy directly to establish what they're after.

WHAT DO I HAVE TO OFFER THAT MATCHES WHAT THE ORGANISATION IS LOOKING FOR?

Show specifically how your experience matches the company's needs. If its advertisement asks for someone who's worked with younger staff and you've had experience of introducing three trainees into the department who've all gone on to be offered permanent positions, make sure you convey this.

If you've been able to speak to the manager with the vacancy, make sure that you've incorporated how you'd be able to meet their stated needs.


Custom Search