Make your résumé sing

Shallow people, sadly, tend to choose style over substance.

But it’s worth remembering that shallow people often get jobs. Whatever type of CV you choose to write – and it’s probably worth writing different ones for different jobs – it’s absolutely vital to make it look good.

By “good,” I don’t mean fancy fonts or elaborate layouts with colourful borders.

I mean the exact opposite – I mean something easy to read.

I mean bullet points, rather than big, thick slabs of text.

Clear headings, consistent formatting and lots of white space.

Don’t even think about throwing in headers or footers, and the same goes for pictures, tables or graphs. Most recruiters read hundreds of CVs a day and, like all of us, have limited patience. They will look dimly on any layout that’s unnecessarily complicated. Or more likely, they won’t look on it at all.

When it comes to the text, keep it relevant. There’s no need to include absolutely everything you’ve ever done, right back to your school choir and paper round. By all means, say you play tennis if you’re applying for a job at a sports club, or that you give to charity if it’s an NGO, but otherwise, keep this information to yourself.  A CV is not an autobiography.

Having said that, it’s certainly worth explaining what some of your experiences have involved, as most job titles don’t simply speak for themselves — “Vice President of Lynch & May” could mean just about anything.

The key is to characterise past responsibilities as “achievements,” and make those achievements sound relevant. You weren’t just “responsible for managing X,” you “successfully managed X”, which is “relevant to this job because of Y” (“Y” being whatever they’re looking for).

Finally, remember to spellcheck. Nobody trusts wirting that is chockful of typos.