Now put yourself on the other side of the fence. Think of all the brochures that have landed on your desk over the years. How many of them can you honestly claim to have read word for word? How many did you even skim right the way through, from the front cover to the back? And how many were given little more than a glance before ending up in the bin?
So, what goes wrong? Why does all that effort so often get completely wasted? Here are some of the more common criticisms leveled against marketing brochures:
- too long;
- too much solid text;
- too many different typefaces;
- bad layout;
- poor quality;
- too glossy;
- too much hype;
- boring;
- just like everyone else's - nothing to make it stand out;
- gimmicky;
- all about what they wanted to say, not what I wanted to know; it did not explain what the benefits to me of the product or service were.
To Begin with, what - and who - Is a CV for?
Get one thing straight, right from the start. Your CV is never going to get you a job. Only you can do that, and in order to do it you have to get in front of the person who has the power to make the appointment. The role which your CV plays in that process varies considerably, depending on which approach you are using and who is going to be reading it.
When you are responding to an advertised vacancy, your CV -together with your covering letter - will be what determines whether you get an initial meeting, usually with a recruiter rather than the ultimate decision maker. The way most recruiters use CVs is as a method of ruling people out rather than in, so you have to pay as much attention to avoiding the snakes as you do to climbing the ladders.
When an appointment is being headhunted, you will normally have spoken either to a researcher or to the executive search consultant who is handling the assignment before you provide a CV - which you may then either send in prior to an interview or take with you to your first meeting. Either way, you will have learned a fair amount about the job on the telephone before you submit your CV. Bear in mind, too, that headhunters rarely pass your CV on to the client. Instead, they prepare their own report on you, which you are unlikely ever to get a look at.
You may, of course, send your CV to headhunters on spec. In that case it will be used either by a search consultant or by someone in the research department as a basis for deciding whether or not to put you on their database.
When you are networking, you may take your CV along to meetings with a view either to asking for advice on it or in order to give copies to your network contacts, which they may in turn pass on to other people who could have a job for you.
When you are making speculative applications, you are initially likely to send a letter, rather than a CV, perhaps taking your CV along to any meetings you obtain. It will then be used in much the same way that slides or handouts are at a presentation - as something to refer to in order to give structure to the session and as a reminder, afterwards, of the key points.
What this all boils down to is that your CV may be used in a variety of different ways and for several different purposes. Which, in turn, begs the question: can a single CV satisfy them all?
Horses for Courses
In the dim and distant past, before word processing became widely available, there would have been no point in even asking that question. No one seriously thought of retyping their CV each time they applied for a job. Now, with the opportunity there for you to customize your CV to every single application you make, the point at issue is whether or not the time and effort involved can be justified. If it makes all the difference to you getting the job you want, then it has to be worthwhile. On the other hand, you do have a lot of competing demands on your time. Could you find a better use for that time than endlessly tarting up your CV?
Because everyone's circumstances are different, there is no one answer that is right every time, but there are some simple criteria which can be used to help you make the decision. They just happen to be the same criteria marketing people are recommended to use before they start to write a brochure.
Each time you need to submit a CV, ask yourself the following questions:
- What am I selling?
- To whom am I selling it?
- Why do they need what I have to offer?
- Why should they go for me rather than my competitors?
Vested Interests
The standard CV does, of course have its supporters. However, the worldly wise reader will be only too aware that, in judging how far to be influenced by the views of others, one must always bear in mind where they are coming from and what is in it for them.
Look in the appointments pages of the major national newspapers and you may well see a whole section devoted to 'CV services', with a dozen or so different firms offering to prepare and print your CV for you at apparently very reasonable rates. While these operators may, to be fair, turn out CVs which have a superior appearance to many that pass across the average recruiter's desk, they are inevitably going to be standardized - in more ways than one.
To begin with, when you have a supply of CVs printed off by one of these companies, you inevitably forfeit the ability to customize it, even when there is something you would rather add - or omit - to improve your chances in respect of a particular job vacancy. Secondly, CVs produced in this way often have a mass-produced, and sometimes excessively slick, appearance which can easily give the impression you are conducting a bulk mailing campaign. Finally, recruiters like to get a feel for the individual behind the piece of paper and consequently tend to be turned off by CVs which have obviously been professionally written by a third party.
Exactly the same reaction is created by the CV which comes from an outplacement organization. Many a recruiter has been heard to groan, 'Oh dear, another three from XYZ & Co.!' It is not that outplacement firms encourage their candidates to produce bad CVs - in general, they are better than average - it is just that every CV from any given firm looks exactly the same.
If you have never sat and waded through several hundred CVs in one day, you have no idea just how boring it can be. While recruiters are not going to be impressed by silly gimmicks like printing your CV on magenta colored paper or plastering it with graphics that would be better suited to the wallpaper in a toddler's bedroom, they do nevertheless prefer to see some evidence of it having been written by an individual human being.
The Personal Profile
A lot of outplacement consultants, together with the authors of many articles and books on the subject of job hunting, would have you believe that the way to add this individual impact to your CV is to include a paragraph the intention of which is to summaries, in no more than a few lines, your key selling points. Most commonly referred to as a personal profile, this normally appears either right at the beginning of your CV or immediately after your brief personal details. It is the written equivalent of what one American writer of career books calls the 415-second sales pitch' you are supposed to deliver at the beginning of a networking or speculative telephone call.
Once again, the recipient, the average recruiter, displays considerably less enthusiasm than the outplacement counselors. The general reaction of selection consultants and HR professionals was summed up by Alan Dickinson, managing director of Michael Page Finance. 'Personal profiles are a waste of space, which could be used more valuably to highlight experience and achievements. Candidates should stick to the facts on their CVs. If your experience cannot sell you, personal views certainly will not. Leave the interviewer to make the subjective judgments'.
Another recruiter, confronted by a profile to which he took particular exception, expressed his objections rather more picturesquely. Casting the offending CV on to the floor of his office, he exclaimed, 'If I get one more dynamic, results-orientated executive today, I shall throw up!'
To be fair, it is not so much the concept which is at fault, but the way it is used. The most common errors which people make in preparing their personal profiles are:
O copying American examples which are too 'over the top' for the British market;
employing tired, over-used vocabulary, taken from job advertisements or from examples of personal profiles in job search manuals, rather than making the effort to find fresh and individual words of their own;
O being too subjective and insufficiently objective - too many adjectives and not enough facts;
producing a profile which, far from making them stand out, makes them sound just like any number of other candidates
- there is a remarkable tendency for the majority of profiles to highlight exactly the same personal qualities.
In addition to avoiding these errors, you also need to consider whether the same personal profile is appropriate on every occasion. In order to follow the excellent advice of a leading outplacement consultant and *write your CV as a solution to someone else's problem', you may well need to adapt your profile to each individual target. Although at first sight this may seem unduly onerous, it could pay a double dividend. As well as enhancing the impression your CV makes on the recipient, it will also concentrate your mind on precisely why you are the right person for the job in question.
Naturally, the same added advantage applies to customizing your whole CV for each application, rather than just your personal profile - it forces you to focus on those aspects of your experience, skills and achievements which are going to make you the number one candidate for that particular job. You can even go a step further by trying to predict the questions that are likely to be asked about your suitability and then adapting your CV so that it provides the answers to them.
Some job search gurus recommend that, rather than customizing the whole thing every time, you use what is often called a performance CV. This includes not only a personal profile, in the form of a paragraph describing your personal qualities and experience, but also a run of bullet points under the subheading 'Achievements', both of which are placed close to the beginning of your CV, before your career history. The idea is that you select different achievements each time, but leave the rest of the CV the same.
While the idea behind this has a certain degree of merit, there are some dangers too. Revamping the opening without changing the main body of the CV may end up sending conflicting messages to the reader. Furthermore, recruiters - who like to be able to home straight in on what you have done and where you have done it - tend to be all too easily irritated if they are delayed from getting into your career history by what they may see as irrelevant clutter. If you lose their interest, you lose the interview.
Which format?
Speaking of which, how does the average recruiter like you to lay out your CV?
The format preferred by the vast majority of selection consultants, personnel managers and line managers /decision makers is as follows.
- Start with brief personal details - name, address, telephone number, date of birth.
- If you opt to include a personal profile, keep it succinct and factual - no adjectives, no hype.
- Then give relevant qualifications and educational details, i.e. your university degree but not the subjects you passed 20 or 30 years ago at O level.
- Next and you should by now be only about a third of the way down the first page, go into a reverse chronological career summary.
- Recruiters prefer you to list achievements under the companies they relate to. Otherwise, if you summaries them at the start of your CV, the recruiter's suspicious mind will probably conclude that you are dragging up something you did years ago when you were only just out of university and will consequently discount it.
Alternative Formats
There are, however, alternative formats, and you should be aware of their pros and cons so that you can decide whether your particular circumstances make them worthy of consideration.
A straight chronological CV, starting with your first job and ending with your current or most recent one, makes it easy for the reader to follow your career progression, if that is particularly impressive. This advantage, on the other hand, tends to be outweighed in most cases by the "most relevant experience first' argument. Furthermore, do bear in mind that the vast majority of people will initially give your CV only a very cursory glance. Unless you grab their attention straight away, they are unlikely to read on and may therefore completely miss your key selling points.
For some candidates a chronological format of either the straight or reverse kind has inherent disadvantages in that it highlights such matters as gaps between jobs, frequent changes of employer and switches in career direction. Furthermore, if your last post is not the most relevant one to the application in question, the material which is going to sell you really strongly may be buried somewhere in the middle and could consequently be overlooked.
In an attempt to overcome these disadvantages, candidates sometimes use what is often called a functional CV. Experience and achievements are classified under functional headings like 'management', 'business development', 'training' and so on, rather than being listed under each job. Career history is then summarized, towards the end of the CV, giving only company name, position held and dates. People with really patchy careers may even fudge this section, for example by referring to '12 years at senior management level in the retail sector'.
Most recipients dislike this format and there are two reasons for this. The first is because it is unfamiliar and, unable to find the information they are looking for, they get irritated and probably lose interest - which means the end of the line for you. The second reason stems from the fact that recruiters, being cynical types for the most part, will all too quickly sass you out and realize that you are deliberately trying to hide something.
Catch-22?
So, what on earth do you do if you have this kind of problem? Are you going to be a renegade, and risk annoying recruiters and decision makers? Or are you going to give the customers the format they want, in spite of the fact that it may not show you off in the best light?
Furthermore, even if you do not have anything to hide and the customers' preferred option - the reverse chronological CV -presents you with no problems, is using a standard format not going to make you look just like everyone else? How on earth do you make yourself stand out?
The answers are actually remarkably simple. To begin with, avoid focusing on the CV in isolation. It is just one part, albeit an important one, of the whole process of finding a new job. For example, if your CV is going to draw attention to something like a choppy career record, there may be a far better solution than trying to fudge around it by using a CV format which makes people irritated and suspicious.
Start by going back to your targeting. There are some jobs where the fact that you have moved around a lot may actually be seen as an advantage. Take management consultancy firms - they need people who have hands-on exposure to a variety of different situations. Candidates who have spent their entire working life in a single organization are rarely of interest to them.
Then give some thought to the methods you are using. In the case of advertised vacancies the volume of response often results in CVs being used negatively, as a means of screening people out. If your patchy career history is the reason you are not even getting to the first interview, consider concentrating more on networking and speculative applications, where the CV does not have to be submitted until you have already got yourself a meeting - at which stage it is not being used to rule you in or out but as a basis for discussion.
Talking of which, let us go back to two more of the basic rules about marketing brochures. Firstly, wise marketing professionals always question, right at the start, whether a brochure actually is the best way to achieve their objective. Sometimes it is, while on other occasions it is not. It is exactly the same with CVs. Sometimes you do need to submit one. In other circumstances you may have a greater chance of achieving your purpose by using a letter or a telephone call. For example, while a functional CV is not popular with recruiters, they will be far less likely to react adversely if you summaries your experience in a similar fashion in a letter. Whereas they expect CVs to be in a certain format, against which they can tick off whether or not you conform to what they are looking for, there are no such expectations with letters.
Secondly, marketing people always think carefully about how a brochure is going to get to its target audience. Will it be part of a bulk mails hot, handed over personally at a client visit, sent with a personalized covering letter following a phone call etc.? Again the same applies to CVs.
When responding to an advertisement you use a covering letter. Since this letter will normally be looked at before your CV, it may well be the best place to emphasize your key achievements and to make use of some of the material which might otherwise go into your personal profile. Many recruiters find such material much more acceptable in a letter, although you must still take care to stick to facts and avoid excessive hype.
When you are being headhunted, you either mail the CV, again with a covering letter, after you have had a chat on the phone or else you actually deliver it personally. Speculative applications to headhunters always involve a covering letter as well as a CV and may be preceded by a phone call.
In networking, you hand the CV over personally and if contacts pass copies on they again either do so personally or use a covering letter. Finally, when making speculative applications direct to potential employers, you may initially use a letter which, in effect, summarizes selected parts of your CV, the parts you select naturally being the ones which sell you and the ones you leave out being those which might turn the buyer off.
What this all adds up to is that your marketing brochure really consists in many cases not just of a CV, but of a CV which is complemented and enhanced by the letter which accompanies it. There are even instances in which a letter on its own becomes your marketing brochure.
Keeping the Customer Satisfied
First, however, you will see how you can give the customers the kind of CV they like to receive, yet still create an impact that will put you one step ahead of the competition. Contrary to what some people may suggest, this involves neither the use of overblown hype, nor being devious or concealing information. Instead it is based on employing the inside knowledge which you now have of how CVs are perceived by their recipients, and then on applying yourself to the preparation of your own CV in a professional manner.
Whichever way you produce your CV, you will always find someone who would like it done differently - it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time. A more realistic aim is to try to please as many people as possible as much of the time as possible and you can do that by observing the following guidelines.
- Always be aware of whom your CV is going to, how it will be delivered to them and how they are going to use it.
- Write your CV as a solution to the other person's problem -not as your personal ego trip.
- Use the format most people want to see: reverse chromological.
- Only insert a personal profile before your career history if it is going to have a stronger impact on the recipient than your most recent experience and achievements. If you do use one, keep it brief, factual and very precisely targeted.
- Prepare a core CV for general use, but study it carefully before each submission and always edit it to whatever extent is necessary in order to present yourself in the best possible light for the specific purpose in question.
- While a covering letter can be used to avoid or limit the extent to which you customize your CV, beware of the risk of inconsistencies between the two documents.
- Never allow a 'second best' CV to go out. It will probably be the end of that particular opportunity as far as you are concerned. Consider the time you spend on getting it dead right not as a chore but as an investment.
