CV tips & tricks

Workshop follow-up

Thank you everyone who participated in our CV workshop—we’re excited about your interest and engagement throughout the session. It was great to see such enthusiasm and thoughtful questions. Below you’ll find the follow-up materials covering the key topics we discussed, so you can continue refining and strengthening your CV with confidence.

The Golden Triangle

Recruiters receive a lot of CVs for the same position, that is why they follow a common strategy to be able to select the candidates that would fit best the position. Usually they only take between 6-8 seconds looking at each CV searching for keywords. This scanning however is not random, they follow a kind of F shape around the CV, that is called the golden triangle.

We should take this information to our advantage when writing a CV to enhance our chances of getting into the next steps.

When creating a CV try to follow the next structure:

1. The CV Header: add your name and contact details, this part of the CV should stand out. Also add your role or general education, for example Civil Engineering.
2. The Powerful Profile Summary:  small summary of which are your motivations and your background. It is nice to adapt these small summaries towards the different positions you are applying to.
3. Experience: detail your most recent or most relevant job experiences. Bullet points work wonders here, providing digestible snippets of your roles and accomplishments.
4. Important skills and education: all your education and different certifications that make you suitable for the position.
5. Extras: volunteering, scholarships, awards… Everything is a nice addition.

This is not set in stone, you should try to adapt to the different positions and your experience. For example, if you do not have a lot of experience or you feel like your education is more relevant to the position you can put it before.

Also a CV is not something fixed; you can always prioritize different information or change the summaries in order to adapt to different calls.

Dont’s

When building a CV there are some things that should be omitted:

• Fake information: do not exaggerate or add fake info. This is a common mistake especially for languages. If you have a A2 in German do not say that you have a B2, because most probably you will get caught
• Graphs or percentages: do not measure your skills in percentages or add graphs that represent percentages. Those scales are based on your subjective perspective, in general in your CV be as objective as possible.
• Misspelling: double check the grammar and vocabulary, specially if you are doing your CV in a language that is not your native one.
• References: if not asked do not add references of other people on your CV.
• Hobbies: try only to add them if they can add some additional value to he position.
• Civil status or religion
• Full on address: you can add the city you live in, but not your full address.
• Salary: do not add your last salary or the one you want to get.

Now adding the photography or not, that is a tricky question, it depends on the country you are applying to. On one hand, in continental Europe add your photography. On the other hand,  in English speaking countries (UK, USA, Australia, Ireland…) do not add your image unless they ask for it.

Tips and tricks

Here are some general advices to enhance your CV:

• Cluster the information: you can add visual divisions, bold or different visual separation to cluster it.
• No fancy font: your CV has to be readable so avoid difficult to read fonts. Try to go for fonts like Time New Roman, Open Sans, Arial…
• Used bullet points to organized the information
• Prioritised information: your CV should be 1 or 2 pages so sometimes you should prioritise the information depending on the position.
• Create a consistence format so that everything is coherent
• You can used bold and italics to highlight different pieces of information, but using it strategically. So that the recruiters pay attention to it

Workshop by Delia Rocío Jara García <3