CV Dos and Don'ts

It takes at least two days to write a superb new application, addressing the issues and organising the information so that you sell yourself. The biggest error most people make is throwing away a great chance by rushing a mediocre CV out at the last minute. Regard your CV and application letter as work in progress and give it a polish every couple of months. You never know when you will be asked for it. As a professional CV writer I have known people return to the same agencies that had previously refused them, this time with a great application that gets them noticed. The difference between managing your career and just letting it happen can be more than the cost of your home over the course of a lifetime. You need to take this task seriously right from the start. You do not need to be headlining the trivial details of your life like your address and what primary school you went to. You do not need to tell someone that the document is a CV. For each occupation and each level of each occupation and for changes of career and country there are key things you need to be saying that recruiters want to hear. If you already know enough then spend some time listing these key things before you ever start writing your application. If you need more information, then start collecting it, start finding out what buzzwords, concepts and competencies that will carry conviction. If you follow a boring format or copy out your job definition it will be dull as ditchwater to recruiters who have to read lots of applications every day. You need to reach these people where they get interested. The story of your career needs to build up expectations that you are worth meeting. You need to tell them the context in which your achievements have taken place and let them know what value you offer for the future. Enter the page content here. Do not pepper your CV with titles like PROFILE, CAREER OBJECTIVE and SKILLS unless you want to appear like someone who has slavishly followed a template. You can have an introduction to your CV but there's no need to label it. All you really need is a few sensible headings such as PROFESSIONAL, CAREER and PERSONAL - under which you can group your skills/qualifications, narrative of achievements and necessary details. Bulleted paragraphs are a great way to save space and add impact but they need to be congruent. They need to relate to the one before and the one after in an intelligent way. Lists of superlative claims with no substantiating evidence cannot be understood in context and cut no ice with anyone.

The medium is in the message. If they have reached the third paragraph of your letter and glanced at your CV, you have already shown them that you can communicate. There is no need to tell them you are a GOOD COMMUNICATOR, a SELF-STARTER or a GREAT TEAM PLAYER in so many words. It needs to be implicit in your account of yourself, not stuffed under their nose as a grandiose claim. People who do that look naive; people who get good jobs come across as mature enough to know how to say things that matter about the real issues involved. People cannot help but be impressed by talented design and clever typesetting. Your choice of fonts and styles, however, is somewhat limited by the restrictions of email and online CV Builders. You need to find out what these restrictions are by studying the word processing program you are using and asking yourself: how can I be sure that my fonts and format arrive on the reader's computer the same way they left here? If you want to make a subtle and sophisticated impression you need to start finding out about the technicalities by actually reading the help files and manuals you have so far taken for granted. Your letter needs to sing, summarise, promise, capture the spirit of what's best about you. Safe, boring, over-length, repetitive letters that regurgitate your CV or try to match every single minor point in the job definition will have one damaging effect on the reader - they will think you are not very bright. Professional writers throw away more stuff than they publish; put it all down and then reduce it until you fit two pages. If necessary group your entire EARLY CAREER under a separate heading and just give each job a line or two. Place the focus on the last 5-10 years and the highest levels of activity and achievement. Cut the minor roles and competencies which are already implied by the big stuff you do. Write your brief and powerful introduction last; when you know what you need to say to summarise your offering, and don't bother giving it a heading anyone can see what it is.

How To Build a Winning CV that Positions your Personal Brand Powerfully

The words "Curriculum Vitae" translated literally mean "the story of your life." Your CV is a very important document: With it rest your hopes and dreams for the future, that next step up the career ladder, a better position, more money, new challenges, etc. Therefore, if you do not want to miss out on that dream opportunity, your CV has to represent the best you can offer. Writing a CV that has the potential to be short-listed and/or make a positive impact is a skill and requires expertise. Many brilliant professionals and top brains havent been able to make it to the top or get the desired results in their careers only because they couldnt position their talents, skills, knowledge and experience positively.

Lets look at the psychology of selection here. A recruiter or a hiring manager is a human being who, like all other human beings, is driven by emotions. Its a well-established fact today that human decisions in any walk of life are more emotional than rational. The rule of thumb to help define the ratio explaining emotions vs. rationality in human decision-making is now agreed to be approximately 70:30. Dr. Daniel Kahneman and his teams seminal Nobel Prize-winning work clearly establishes that we play in an emotional economy and not a strictly rational one. From consumer behavior to employee attitude to relationship health, everything is driven by human emotions. The science of behavioral economics has clearly upstaged the neoclassical theories of economics in explaining human decision-making processes. The same applies to building a CV. You have to learn to connect to the prospective recruiters/hiring managers. More importantly, you want their mind share in areas where you are sure you shine and possess strengths. The selection process is as much an art as it is a science. The element of human bias will never be completely eliminated. But thats not always bad news. It, in fact, can be an opportunity if you are smart enough to crack this psychological code. Let the biases work for you and not against you. This is where a CV built intelligently can help you. Why a powerful CV? Building a powerful CV is akin to building a personal brand. A good CV is like a positioning tool to position and promote your personal brand. Its the first touchpoint with your prospective recruiters and needs to be handled smartly and with a great degree of care. A more basic benefit is that a powerful CV helps you get an edge in a highly competitive and crowded selection process. It helps you stand out and can definitely get you the right breaks, right career changes or upward career direction. Also, a good CV helps the recruiters peg you from a value perspective and, psychologically speaking, enhances your odds of getting a better remuneration/reward, even before you go to the negotiation table. Last but not least, a smart CV will create a favorable mental predisposition with your interview panel and allow the interview discussion to be steered in the direction you want it to go. This can be the big difference between a successful or an unsuccessful interview. This, to me, is very critical for interviewers and interviewees alike, as too much time is wasted in trying to find faults/gaps, interrogate or indulging in a surface level show of ones knowledge and capabilities. It's vital that the words used in your CV/resume really make the reader want to meet you and invite you to that all-important interview. Your CV/resume is your sales document to a recruiter/employer, and if it fails to sell you, then it will probably end up in the trash bin. A CV is like a brand statement. It does the rounds beyond the audience you expected to target, and thus builds a perception about you. It helps build your constituency, outside of your immediate network. It remains a potent and powerful tool to attract the right audience for the right reasons. If you are senior, and are doing well, your CV should be all the more powerful and should even be exemplary. So, what are the critical steps to build that "powerful CV?"
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Please spend quality time to research the organizations and the roles you are applying for. This is the most basic (yet most critical) step and surprisingly, the most ignored aspect of career management. The company web site and other public domain

information do offer some important cues. They will help you understand some key themes that should show up in your CV.
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Build multiple versions of your CV suited to the relevant industry, organization, role, etc. It makes an immediate impact. A good CV should never be one-dimensional and you should never take a single version fits all approach. Ensure that you highlight the right things and manage around the gaps/nonstrengths. The first page of your CV should capture your profile highlights (educational, experiential and personality strengths) and major professional accomplishments (tailored to intersect well with the role/organization requirements). This is not a manipulative process but a subtle attempt to position your best self, authentically, while not concealing any important facts. Trust me, the interviewer will be better off knowing what you can do, rather than what all you cant do. A key learning from the study of behavioral economics is that brand recall is not just a factor of the best features, price, etc., but the ability to build an emotional connection with the consumer. In this context, your personal brand needs to make that connection with the prospective recruiter Examine the job ad carefully. It usually contains some vital information regarding the role deliverables and the expected skill, knowledge and experience profile. Also, most ads will describe certain personality attributes that the organization feels will help the person succeed in the job environment. There is an entire school of thought which discounts the value of this information provided, especially regarding the personality attributes, and most CVs ignore this. This is an opportunity lost. Leverage this opportunity and differentiate yourself by weaving these themes/attributes into the way you are describing yourself and your experience, skills, etc. It is the least emphasized aspect and needs some skills and effort, but can pay huge dividends in creating strong brand equity. Explain your strengths smartly and clearly. A positive psychology-based approach offers you better chances of success. Understanding your differentiating strengths and being able to clearly articulate the same requires effort and skill, and this is very often the last mile that most people are not able to run, much to their detriment. Lets not forget what Peter Drucker once said, Most people feel that they know what their strengths are, and they are mostly wrong. This is an aspect of self-awareness and introspection that matters a lot. You need to be able to master this piece, and soon. The best way to do this is to put down your thoughts around your key successes and the inherent strengths that enabled those successes. Write down your successes and strengths as an independent, introspective exercise and give it quality time. You can then add this just after the profile highlights. This usually is a tough process and my review of over 5000 CVs clearly tells me that most

people do a pretty shoddy job of this. Finally, be conscious and intelligent about what you want to position and how you want to position it. Dont over-position, dont underposition--you need to "just-right-position." The best way to do this is to weave your key skills, knowledge, experience and personality strengths while explaining your major achievements/successes. This strategy is a lot more powerful that just churning out reams of paper explaining all the great work that you have done and then somewhere in a remote, nondescript section of your CV, trying to explain your strengths, etc. Most CVs lack connectivity and alignment of perspectives. Thats what a great CV brings to attention, instantaneously. The most critical success factor is around your CVs ability to steer attention to your best self or, in other words, your key strengths. This is the most important aspect of your CV, and needs the most attention. Its critical to understand that your CV is your brand, and helps a lot of people understand your value proposition. It definitely has a huge psycho-emotive dimension to it and hence needs to be managed well. Building a powerful CV needs effort, skill and some intelligent research. Lets not oversimplify this process. The CV has to be authentic as it makes a brand promise which you will need to fulfill during the interview process and more importantly, when you start performing in your dream role. Lets accept its relevance and impact and consciously take control of the process, so that we can chart the career paths we set out to achieve. It can be the big difference between success and failure Lalit Khanna Executive coach for global leaders and a leading career counselor. For more information on career building and personal branding, contact lalitkhanna16@gmail.com.

Quick Tips:
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Research the job description and role thoroughly and build multiple versions of the CV. Position your key successes and experiences in the most relevant and impactful fashion. Be authentic,, yet smart, to steer recruiter attention to your strong aspects and manage around your non-strengths.