EZE DIRECTORY

Article Word Count : 879

Are you using your CV to market your qualifications, skills and expertise? Are you making the best 1st impression possible Are you making yourself stand out or are you underselling yourself?


Set up a professional email address: Include your full name or something close to it, ie. Tombrown_salesrep@gmail.com


KISS, less is more: Allow the reader to be able understand the main points within 30 seconds. Follow the KISS principle, which stands for Keep It Short Stupid! Use less rather than more words. "Less is more.", ie.delete helping verbs (has, have, had), delete articles (a, an)


Write a targeted CV: Match the job profile as best as you can.


Objective: State your motivation for the position. Profile: Write an overall statement highlighting your qualification, experience and skills relevant to the position. Skills: Highlight transferable skills, ie. leadership, financial acumen, managing team performance. Identify if your predominant skills are : data skills, people skills, thing skills, idea skills. Experience: Don’t necessarily list all of you work experiences. Include content only if it is relevant to the job. Interests: Include hobbies which relate to the job you’re applying to.


Highlight actions & results: Use action verbs to list what you “did”, ie. implemented, managed… Describe & quantify the results of what you do. Be precise. For example:
·prepared annual financial reports which reduced errors by 30% and required 1/5 of the original turn around time


Highlight your strengths: Highlight your unique strengths which will make you stand out against other candidates. Identify the strengths which keep resurfacing in your work experiences. A strength is your ability to perform which is or feels : Natural: A strength feels so natural that you assume everyone else can do what you do. Recurring: You use your strengths repeatedly and each time nearly perfectly. Compelling: You feel compelled to use your strengths because they have both an ‘it feels good’ and ‘I can’t help it’ quality to them. For example: a particularily tidy person is likely to strive to make any environment he/she works in, organized and efficient.


Several clues help you identify your strengths: Yearnings: Yearnings, especially when felt early in life, reveal the presence of a talent. They exert a consistent pull or magnetic influence. Rapid learning: Sometimes, comparatively late in life, something sparks a ‘dormant’ talent. You start to learn a new skill and immediately your brain seems to light up as if it were suddenly flicked to ‘on’. It is the speed at which you learn a new skill that tells you of the talent’s presence. This new skill has come to you so naturally that you can’t wait to put it into practice. Satisfactions : If it feels good when you perform an activity, chances are that you are using a talent. Tense : Identify the tense you are thinking in when you are performing an activity. Are you thinking in the present, “when will this be over?” or in the future, “when can I do this again. source: now, Discover your strengths by M. Buckingham & D. Clifton


Highlight your unique points of differentiation: Assess your experience, values, skills and interests. What makes you stand out from other candidates? What motivates you? What values do you bring to the work place, such as being a self-starter, adoring best practises, being a team player? What past activities/roles were important to you development? Why? What are your significant accomplishments? What skills are identified in these? Which of your interests are met in your current job?


Prepare STAR’s (for a behavioral based interview): STAR stands for: situation or task, action, result. Behavioral based interviewing is based on the idea that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. A potential manager can predicate how you are likely to perform in a job, by looking at how you handled similar situations or tasks in the past. This is because we tend to repeat our behaviors.


Analyze the job and identify behaviors (skills, qualities) that you will need to be successful. Write out and practice your ‘success stories’ where you demonstrated such behaviors, and particularly those that match the job in question. For example: When I worked as an Online Marketing Analyst (situation), I implemented a marketing campaign targeting new online users (action) which increased sales by 25% over a 3 month period (result). Nt: Behavioral based interviews have questions that begin with “What did you do when…?”. Situational type of interviews have questions that begin with “What would you do if…?”


Research jobs adverts that match your past experiences: For example, go onto ‘jobs.ie’ or ‘irishjobs.ie’. If you worked as a Marketing Assistant, look at all the Marketing Assistant adverts. Copy and paste any elements that ‘are you’ which are missing from your CV. Often people write CV’s in their own words rather than use the expressions and catch phrases that are the ‘lingo’ of the job market.


Read your CV as if you were the employer: Can you see enough reasons to interview you for the job in question? Scrutinize your CV for possible weaknesses. Prepare answers for questions like: 'Why did you stay only 3 months at this job?’ or ‘Why happened in this gap period?'’


Lastly, be prepared to refine and tweak your CV more than on

Article Source: EZEDIR.COM