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Once you are done with your education and graduate from university, you will finally look out for jobs and start to furnish your career. The first step to this is to have a professional, well-written CV that will be sent to different work organizations. Your CV and the cover letter are the most important documents to consider before applying for any job.
CV, termed as Curriculum Vitae, presents full information about your educational background and work accomplishments when applying for a certain job. However, every professional CV requires a structural format to be presented in. Your CV should have the potential to impress and convince the employer to consider you for the second step. In this article let’s discuss in detail How to write a professional CV and what must it include. Professional CVs are tailored in a way that they are exactly fit for the applied job.
A CV and a resume are two similar yet a little different documents. The main difference between each comes with the length, your experience, and the job you are applying for. A resume is mainly a brief document of a maximum of two pages with your information, it’s more effective if it’s structured in just one page as well. Whereas, the CV has no limit and is very detailed. CV can also go up to 10 pages. The second major difference between a CV and a resume is if you are applying for an academic position like a professor, teacher, etc, you will be required to send your CV as it provides detailed information about everything. However, the resume can be sent to jobs that aren’t related to academics and are mostly focused on industry or corporate offices, etc.
Anchor Resume has a team of certified resume writers that make your CV and resume with better and modern drafted templates.
ATS, also known as an Applicant tracking system is software through which resumes are scanned during a recruiting process. This helps to gather and sort the profile summary and evaluate the jobs according to the vacant positions present. Employers and recruiting managers use ATS as electronic gatekeepers. The ATS system categorizes resume information and then analyses it for specific and relevant keywords to determine if the job application should be forwarded to the recruiter. Its role is to filter out unqualified applications so that the recruiter may focus on examining prospects who are more likely to be a good fit for the post. In other words, the ATS is more likely to reject the least-qualified individuals than to discover the greatest fit.
Unfortunately, a good prospect may be overlooked if a resume template is not designed and formatted with the applicant tracking system in mind.
The following 10 steps will help you create a professional CV.
It’s always advised to do your homework before you apply to any place. The best way to do so is to do a little research about your desired company, its background, the employer, surrounding, workplace, etc. This information will not only be useful to you but will also help in drafting a cover letter accordingly. This information can be helpful to mention the relevant skills in your CV too.
Once you come to this step, make sure that you smartly design your CV. There are many CV designs uploaded online that can be a huge guide for you but you should choose one that fits your requirements. For example, the design of a CV for the formal role of administrator or a manager will be very different from someone who is applying for maybe a marketing position in HR, etc. Therefore, choose wisely.
There are so many types of templates present online that will make it very easy to draft your CV, but make sure that it’s clear, understood by the reader, and formal. It is preferred to use viewer-friendly styles to structure your CV. Making a remarkable first impression in front of your employer is so important as they must be going through 100’s CVs at the very same time, therefore you must make sure that your CV is formatted in a way that it is brief but has all the required information for the applied position.
Always list academic information from your school to your current qualification. There is also an option to include all info about your certificates, diplomas, events, degrees, etc. You can even add external links attached to your documents like certificates etc, through which the Employer can easily have access to it by themselves.
Add all your previous work experience, be it internships, events, contract jobs, permanent employer, etc in the CV. Add the most recent one worst and move onwards. This will help in grasping the attention of the reader in a better way.
A CV should be no more than two pages long as discussed earlier. From an HR perspective, this is a vital size of a good professional CV. It shouldn’t be time-consuming. Even if you have good job experience history, keep in mind that the manager may only have the 60s to go through your CV before moving to the next. Keeping it brief and simple ensures that the hiring manager receives as much information about you as possible in as little time as possible.
All the contact information mentioned in the CV is supposed to be accurate and clear. If the reader or the recruiter is satisfied with your CV, the next step for them will be to call or email you for an interview. So make sure, the email address along with the phone number is valid and active.
Adding relevant information in your CV regarding your interests can be a highlight as well. These can give a better picture of who you are. Many skills can be different jobs you apply for. A skill refers to the capacity to do a task. We gain skills via our experiences in life and work. Skills that you should mention in your CV can be task management, data analytics, reporting, interpersonal skills, etc. for each skill give a brief description of how it developed and practiced. For example
Skill – Team worker (worked with school heads to make decisions for the betterment of the school)
Have some professional or a family member, glance through your cover letter and CV before sending them out to double-check your grammar and spelling. Alternatively, you might hire a professional editor to proofread your cover letter and CV for errors.
A perfectly formatted CV will result in the acceptance of your desired job. Once your CV is ready, you can now start to apply everywhere. Each job will have its own set of criteria and to make sure it gets approved by ATS your CV should match the job description.
