Curriculum Vitae (CV) is a summary of our academic, professional work and other extraordinary skills and talents. It is a self-marketing tool. One should be highly dedicated while preparing it so as to ensure that he/she gets the best chance of grasping the job which they wish. It is an essential tool in our job search. It should be incredibly professional and should win more interviews. A recruiter will have a heap of CVs to look into. They might spend hardly half a minute to flip through all the CVs and find an expert in that. Our CV should bind the recruiter to think that we have high level of efficiency and we are the potential candidates for the role and should prompt them to invite us for the interview.

Sweet and short: The major mistake people do while drafting a CV is they will put together all the information. As a result the CV will be too lengthy and may become boring to the recruiter to go through. We should prepare our CVs briefly and should avoid irrelevant information. Generally, two pages are allowed and that should express everything in bullet points. There should not be any paragraphs.

History: The recent records should be added and the past information should be summarized briefly. The recruiters will show interest on what the candidate has done very recently with a small introduction of the basics of older information. We do not need to mention the months of previous work experience. Listing out the years alone would be enough so that we can also cover up the chronological gaps if any. Our work history and qualifications should be listed in descending chronological order. One should avoid using the technical jargon and academic terms to describe our talents and experience. The employer may not be aware of it.

Key Skills: Rather than reporting our key skills and abilities we should enclose evidence of it through our employment history. We can also maintain a blog, so that mentioning the link alone would matter a lot. Pointing out the ISBN number would be ideal if we are the author of the book. Because, it is of no use to list out the published books or articles without dates and publishers. When we have core competency and experience in the field in which we are looking for and we have undergone any training program, such qualifications should find a prominent place in the CV.

It is essential for us to know the requirements of a particular position in the company for which the CV is intended. If we are proposing to send the CV for various positions, we need to organise a variety of CVs corresponding to different career objectives.

References

There is no need to include the referees in our CV, as they may be frustrated due to continuous enquiries made by the recruiters. If we include so, then we should ensure that they have very good opinion about us and can help us to some extent.

It is better to prepare our professional CV as we come out of the college. The CV should be upgraded once in six months or as soon as we complete any training or whatever worthy. Each and every time when we apply for a new job, we need to modify it accordingly. The worst thing many people do is that they would simply change the covering letter and send the same CV to all the organisations. We should research the background and should identify our personal traits and skills which will be suitable to the mentioned job requirements. Only then the recruiter will pay attention to our CV and we can also sell our talents.

It is highly important to mention the contact information, name, address, email address and contact phone number clearly, using white paper and black ink, in bold letters. The neatly presented CVs would charm the recruiters and make our job search much easier, prima facie.