5 tips for a standout CV

Margaret O’Neill is a Careers Consultant and accredited coach with over 20 years of experience in top business schools, working with international students of all ages, backgrounds, and experiences.

Your CV is usually the first thing a recruiter will look at – and if you’ve applied online, along with hundreds of others, you probably have at best 10 seconds to impress. You want the reader to see the impact you’ve had in previous roles so they can understand how you can add value for them. So your CV needs to be clear, relevant and impactful to keep the recruiter reading beyond the “golden half-page” and down to your actual achievements.

1. Remember the basics: Name, email and mobile number (no need for street address), followed by qualifications, then work experience in reverse chronological order. You can finish with relevant extra curricula activities and interests, particularly if they demonstrate skills that you’ve not otherwise been able to incorporate in your work experience. Competitive sports or equivalent, such as volunteering is always worth including. It’s shorthand for commitment, discipline and team contribution.

2. Put yourself in the shoes of the recruiter, who might be reading these all day. Keep your CV simple, clear, no fancy fonts, nothing beneath 10pt, ideally one page, no more than two. Ditch the acronyms, jargon and superlatives - this is a marketing document, not your life story. Less is more.

3. Keep it relevant. I’d suggest you keep a spreadsheet of achievements from your previous roles and pick out those that speak directly to the skills and experience required for the job you’re applying for. Mirror the words and language used in the job description so you’re already speaking like you are “one of them”. Include only the most impactful and relevant - don’t make the reader wade through a lot of wordy bullets to find the nuggets that demonstrate what you can do for them.

4. Think about impact and achievement, not responsibilities. Listing your previous job description says nothing about how good you were at it. Describe your most impressive, relevant achievements in each role in the past active tense; if you can quantify them, so much the better. That’s not always possible, but if you have improved a process to make it more efficient, delivered a project under tight time and budget constraints, saved time or money – say so, with actual examples.

5. Finally, get a friend or colleague to proofread your CV to ensure it’s grammatically correct – we all become word-blind when we go over the same document many times and that’s how errors slip in. It’s useful to ask your reader what they most remember from your CV – is this the impression you want to leave? If it’s not, what do you need to change?
Good luck! It takes time and effort to get the CV right, but if it gets you in front of the right people, it’s worth it!