The Power of a CV

A CV is the only window that recruiters or hiring managers have into your career before you interview.  It must scream the right message and do it quickly.  A CV is a canvas; more than a collection of words and phrases, it is your opening gambit, your hook.  It is absolutely critical that your CV sells a solution.  When you sell a product, you aren’t selling that product itself, you are selling the solution it offers.  We all know that.  So why do so few CV’s provide a solution to a company’s needs?  You are a salesman for the brief time that CV is in the gaze of a hiring manager.  You’re selling the best product you’ve ever handled: you. 

Curriculum Vitae is described in the Cambridge Dictionary as a “short written description of your education, qualifications and previous jobs which you send to an employer when you are trying to get a job”.  The operative word being Short.  The rest of it, we don’t entirely agree with.  They say a picture paints a thousands words.  A CV should do too, but with less.  

We see 1000’s of CV’s each week and have a real world understanding of what attracts hiring managers to candidates based on a piece of paper or a PDF document.  Your real selling point is you.  Writing a CV to reflect your personality and abilities accurately can be difficult.  

Hiring managers spend an average of 6 seconds reading a resume/CV.  It takes around 160 seconds to boil a kettle.  That’s right, the average hiring manager spends 26 times longer making their coffee than they do reading your CV.  This isn’t a problem, if you make damn sure that those 6 seconds of stage time get the hiring manager reading further.  We can help;  We review thousands of CV’s for our clients positions each week and can almost immediately tell which CV’s we want to take a closer look at.  Others take longer to decipher; these are the ones we are here to fix.