Typical Anatomy of a CV

These are the categories a potential recruiter will be looking for in order to quickly find the information they’re looking for. If your CV isn’t layed out like this recruiters may not know where to look for specific information.

Make these categories extrememly obvious in the page layout to ensure quick parsing, remember it is very easy for a recruiter to immediately move on to another CV if yours isn’t accessible enough.

Professional Profile

Your Preofessional Profile allows you to briefly insert a quick statement about who you are, what you’re looking to achive and state why you’re the person for the job. Your work history and educational experience should back this up.

Key points to remember

  1. You should keep this section as concise as possible. You need to be giving the impression you’re struggling to fit all the informatin into the CV not fill up a space on the page.

  2. Use positive language, this is the biggest oppurtunity to see your character and personality in your CV. Do not cast any unnecessary doubt about any aspect of yourself.

  3. Remember even if you’re not, in this section you’re 100% definitely the right person for the job.

  4. Put the most important information up first. If your current job position is relevant that should be in the first sentence of your professional profile.

Work History and Experience

This is where you place evidence and experience for the points you should have briefly mentioned in your professional profile. It’s also often the biggest deciding factor when deciding between different candidates.

The best structure is to write a paragraph about every relevant position you’ve had to the position you’re applying to. Detailing exactly what key skills you developed here and potentially something to be proud of. When talking about achievements the STAR method is a good way of making sure you’ve covered the relevant details surrounding it.

If you don’t have actual work experience maybe using one or two of the projects from uni will suffice to begin with, but bear in mind not many recruiters will count that as actual experience so don’t claim it to be.

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Remember to include

  • Employer details

  • Your job role/title.

  • Your employment dates

  • Three to four lines of what you did in that role.

Make this section as easy to navigate as possible. It is afterall arguably the most important section to move you on to interview.

Education

As time goes on your education will become less important and eventually will not need to include your qualification, grade, institution and year. But if you don’t have much information or relevant experience outside of education, treat this section in the same way as the Work History and Experience section.

Task

Look at CVs of successful candidates in the field you’re looking to enter to see get a sense of the layouts your CV is up against. If you’re going for a R&D position why not write it in LaTeX, if it’s a web dev position why not design your cv with block colours like a website.

The task this week is simple. Using your target Job Ad of choice edit your CV and write a Cover Letter template.