I am inspired by how many youngsters are working the streets, going in to shops and local businesses and enquiring about work. In such a tough market and these guys are already helping themselves by presenting in person. However, I notice that the CV/resumés that they are offering are rather tombstone like. As a speculative approach each document needs to be unique and jump to the top of the pile.
So, a few suggestions for first-timers:
- Give potential employers some credit – the document you present to them is your CV/resumé– you do not need to headline it with ‘curriculum vitae’
- Use your white space and set the information out clearly. Be consistent, list dates on the right hand side of the page.
- Use a contemporary font [verdana for example] and make good use of bold, underlining and capitals.
- Make the document look professional, check for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors and ensure that there are NONE.
- Do not make up anything – it is essential to tell the truth.
- Position yourself in the first couple of sentences under your contact details. Write a short profile. Look on the internet for examples or ask us for help. Make yourself special.
- Extract your skills. Employers want to see what you have to offer. Your education is important but essentially, they want to employ people with good social skills, customer service awareness and even financial abilities. Think of examples when you have proven that you have these qualities and highlight them in a section.
- Include voluntary work or experience, social activities or sports that demonstrate leaderships and team work.
- Use bullet points to bring these to the attention of the reader.
- Avoid using a table format for the CV/resumé, it makes it harder to upload to the internet should you want to submit the document to job sites.
ASSESSMENT4POTENTIAL, specialise in working with students and supporting them into work.
