Top 5 Mistakes On Cvs/resumes
Top 5 Mistakes On Cvs/resumes
1. Opinions not facts
Imagine the following in a profile statement on a compliance CV:
“A highly experienced Head of Compliance with strong leadership skills and the ability to influence policy decisions.”
It seems like a strong statement but this sentence is an opinion the jobseeker has about their abilities. When a jobseeker states an opinion it will often be the interviewer’s prerogative to get the hard facts about the statement a jobseeker has put forward. This line of interviewing is what we have all come to know and love as competency-based interviewing.
A much more powerful and direct way to communicate suitability on a CV is to use facts. This allows a recruiter or hiring manager to fully understand the level of comprehension a jobseeker has for the job they have applied for and also puts that persons abilities firmly into their mind. The main reason for this is that a hiring manager like any other person comprehends and remembers facts much better than an opinion. It is very difficult for a hiring manager or recruiter to hold onto an opinion particularly when that opinion is generic and not very specific to that individual jobseeker. The classic (and terribly droll) opinion being, “Works well individually or in a team.” Quite honestly, if you can’t do both you really don’t have a place in the modern working world unless you work in quant finance and all they want you to do its lock you in a dark room to crunch numbers.
May we suggest an improvement on our original opinion and turn it into some facts:
10 years experience as Head of Compliance in investment banking
Managed teams of between 5 and 15 from Compliance Assistant to Vice President of Compliance
Lead on 3 global compliance policy documents which affected over 15,000 employees work
Better? We think so.
2. Poor structure
A typical CV consists of the following structure:
Name
Address
Phone Number
Email address
Personal Profile (typically around 10 sentences long)
Education
Career Background
Now, we don’t mean to grumble here at MyComplianceJobs.com but we’d like you to think about the reader of your CV for just a moment. In most cases the most relevant info is in number 7 (Career Background) on the list, unless you are a graduate, in which case number 6 (Education) may be more appropriate.
The hiring manager/recruiter has advertised for a Compliance Manager. Rightly, you decide to submit your CV. The recruiter may have time to sift through your CV and pick out the relevant parts of your experience that apply directly to the job (assuming you have actually tailored your CV). This would assume you have a very patient recruiter at the receiving end of your CV. However, a hiring manager is much less likely to be so forgiving. Recruiting people may only be 5% of their day, so they won’t spend a great deal of time sifting through the info. They need relevant info as soon as possible. If you use the rule that a hiring manager or recruiter needs to see at least 80% of the job description answered within the first 30 seconds of reading your CV or at least on the first ¾ of a page then you won’t go far wrong.
Get tough with yourself:
a) Don’t write ‘Curriculum Vitae’ at the top of your CV it’s more than obvious what the document pertains to.
b) Write your name, the city/town you live in, an email address and your telephone number only.
c) Exclude a personal profile unless it contains facts supporting the specific job application you are going for.
d) Place your education after your career history unless you are a graduate.
e) Tailor your most recent job experience to make sure it relates directly to the job description advertised.
3. Where is the evidence?
This might seem like a straight-forward point but it is another of the top 5 mistakes on CV’s. Not only are most CV’s full of opinions and not facts, they are poorly structured and they often have very little evidence of how the jobseeker can perform the job advertised.
Assume that a job is advertised for a Compliance Monitoring Manager. It is likely that the employer or recruiter is looking for an individual with compliance monitoring experience. Perhaps you would like to apply but don’t have the relevant monitoring experience, although you work with other compliance monitoring assistants and you think you are perfectly capable of performing the job (if not a little better than them!).
Taking the specific role of compliance monitoring you should be able to deduce that it requires an investigative approach. Good compliance monitoring has a lot to do with a person’s
Pages: 1 2