Your CV or resume must do two key things: make it past a first glance and then through a deeper look. It is important to understand how to make your CV work for you during the hiring process.

What's the difference?

• CV: is short for curriculum vitae, from the latin for "course of life." The CV is typically for academic jobs. It tends to be longer and list more detail, although one or two page CVs are used for certain applications, such as award or fellowship nominations.
• Resume: is the standard for most non-academic jobs. Most tend to be one to four pages.

I'll use the term CV here but I am talking about resumes and CVs. I'll note where they are treated differently.

Overview

The hiring process for many positions, particularly in the private sector, passes your CV through two steps.

• In step one, someone vets your CV to ensure you meet the minimum requirements for the job. Note that your CV will be lucky to get more than 30 seconds at this stage. In addition, you have no idea whether this someone is a human resources expert within the firm, an outside recruiter, or a programmer who wrote an automated script attached to an email account.
• In step two , your CV will be passed onto a person or group of people on a hiring committee that takes a closer look.

Some employers do not use this two step process and instead carefully review every CV. It is a good idea to assume otherwise.

Step One

There are plenty of good sites that give advice on formatting your CV and the job process in general. See the jobs section of the HEGIS resources page for more information.

The key in step one is to meet the minimum. While some people get lucky, in general, employers are not interested in giving an poorly-fitting applicant a chance to prove themselves.

• Address the job ad. Use the language of the job ad, especially when it uses specific terms (e.g., C++ programming) or wants particular requirements (e.g., three years of experience as an assistant manager).
• Use standard fonts and paper. Some applicants use special papers or fonts to liven up their CVs but that usually just draws the ire of the reviewer. So, yes, it will catch the eye, but in a bad way. Many employers scan CVs and placed them in a digital database. Do not force the poor person running 300 CVs through the scanner to reorient your CV from landscape to portrait or pry off a photo. Your CV may just end up in the recycling bin instead.
• Make your CV machine-readable. Many larger firms use filtering software to weed out CVs that are a poor fit by parsing the text or by running scanned CVs through optical character recognition software. You are out of luck if you use non-standard fonts, formatting, loads of tables, or images.
• Minimize personal information. You should not include personal characteristics such as height/weight, disabilities, marital status, age, race/ethnicity, place of birth, citizenship, or affiliations beyond trade or professional organizations. There are certain characteristics about which an employer can ask in the interview as long as they relate to meeting minimum standards for safe performance of the job. An employer cannot ask your nationality, for example, but they can ask if you can legally work in the US. Similarly, they cannot ask your age or weight but they can ask if you can meet some minimum level of physical capability necessary for the job.

Step Two

The key here is to impress a reviewer who devotes anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes to your resume.

Important things:

• Work history. Your work history is the most important part of the CV because it relates where have you worked and for how long.
  • Most careers have a trajectory. IT jobs tend to be shorter than most, for example, so it is common to see an applicant who has moved from job to job every eighteen months while moving upward in responsibilities. If the same person has moved from job to job every six months and there is no trajectory then the reviewer may wonder why.
  • Work history also tells the reviewer what you have done and with what. Highlight your skills here.
  • Title/job mismatch. Make clear what you did, not just the title of the job.
  • Specificity. Be clear on what you did.
• Skills I: If you do not have much of a work history then you will have to focus on skills and aptitudes instead. You work with what you have. See below for more on this.
• Clean design. Use a consistent and clean format for presenting information. Don't be afraid of a little white space - a dense CV can be burdensome on the eyes. Above I noted that you should not monkey around with fonts and images, but at the same time, mix it up a little. Using a sans-serif font like Arial for headings, for example, and a serif font like Times Roman is a subtle way of jazzing up your CV for a person who is combing through hundreds of them.

Less important things:

• Professional objectives. I know that many of the kind folks at the career center will disagree, but the 'objectives' paragraph takes up a lot of prime real estate. I have yet to meet an employer that doesn't just skim through this section or skip it entirely because it never really seems to say anything that sets one applicant apart from another. So, sure, put it in, but make it short.
• Skills II. The skills section is not as important as it is made out to be for the simple reason that many applicants (not you, of course) just toss in anything with which they are remotely familiar. Putting 'Java programming' in this section is not as useful as a work history with the line "Created a stand-alone J2EE server application." That said, you must have the right keywords to make it past step one. You are out of the game if they ask for Java experience and the word Java does not appear in your CV. And as noted above, if your work history is spotty or short, then the skills section is that much more important.

Could be important but usually not:

• Other interests. Some recruiters don't bother, some do. If you have a particularly interesting hobby or pastime of which you are proud, sure, put it in.
• Google! Keep in mind that a reviewer may look up your name and the names of past employers. One in five employers uses the web to get additional information on applicants. Do a google search on yourself and see what comes up. Make sure that pages you have control over contain positive information about you.
• Web 2.0. The growth in social networking sites has been fun for everyone, but consider making that Facebook or My Space profile private. The ready availability of alumni email addresses, for example, makes it very easy for employers to gain access to Facebook. Similarly, if you have a blog, ask yourself what a potential employer will make of it. Do what you want to do online, but take steps to keep your public and private lives separate.
• Education. Where you went to school is important, but not really. Most employers are interested in what you can do.
• Cover letter. Many places just scan CVs and ignore the cover letter. Make sure your CV can stand on its own. That said, when you do include a cover letter, make sure it is specific to the job. A generic cover letter is worse than none at all.