As I mentioned in a former post, I decided to focus this year on posts around hiring and recruiting, I thought it’d be nice to give the readers an understanding of what happens behind the scenes when you send your CV…

As a person that interviewed around 50 people last year and saw So much more CVs! I have to give you some insight into how’s this process is going.

Your motivation!

Your motivation is simple, get to an interview and set expectations using your CV

1. You want to convey who you are using a page (yes, yes 1, 2 tops! – we’ll get to that later).
2. You need to able to back-up what you wrote in your CV in reality (if you worked on Mongo 5 years ago and you don’t know how to do a simple find, just remove it…)
3. You want to tell the reader who you are and what you can do in the big picture, less on the task level (if you are a Senior Backend Web developer I assume you have built APIs and can and did design RESTful)
4. You want to represent the role you want in your CV. if you are applying for Hands-Off position and your CV is all about the Hands-On, you are sending a wrong message.

Behind the Scenes

Why 1 sheet (max 2 pages), why the big picture? why convey who you are as a person?

• 1 page (max 2) is to help the reader (me for example) to see who you are in no time, take into account that I’m going over so many CVs, I will not read after page 2, it’s nothing against you, I just can’t afford it… Also, when I print it, I will only print 1 sheet (that’s why 2 pages are still fine, it’s still 1 sheet). If you have more than 2 pages you have redundant things there… going back to the Seniority level, if you are a Senior, talk about the projects you lead, I’ll assume you can do the basics! if you are a Junior, talk in minor details, but be able to back them up.
• Why the big picture? As a hiring manager, I’m looking to see what you can do, not what tasks you have done… for example: when you write that you’ve initiated and implemented Health-Endpoints to your systems I get so much info from this:
  1. You can push for things
  2. You care in general
  3. You care about quality
  4. You can deliver
  5. You know how to implement API endpoints

It’s less to read, but says so much more!

• Why add personality to your CV, well… this one is a fail-safe, it’s not intentional, but after reading many many MANY CVs, a Hiring manager/HR might stop seeing the person behind the CV and see only the data, as a Hiring manager I try to never fall in that trap, but I might, when people add Hobbies/A joke/Personal touch it makes me have a personal connection to the human side of the sheet of paper in front of me

Recommendations

So, it’s simple

• Keep your CV accurate and to the point
• Be able to back it up
• If it’s not relevant, remove it!
• Tell a story, don’t count tasks
• Give space for your personality in your CV
• Adjust your CV for the role you want!

And just to be transparent I added my CV to this post, yes yes, I summarized 12 years of experience into 1 page, font size 10, take into account that I removed most tech stuff as I’m hands-off, but I kept some to remind the reader I know and have done Hands-On before (I also didn’t give any info about my past position beside the last 3, aside from the name of the company, position, dates – if my interviewers would want to know more they can ask me during our interview.

Happy to get your feedback, My CV can be found here