Easy Improvements for Making Your CV Unique

A CV (Curriculum Vitae) is a reflection of your professional achievements. While a recruiter receives hundreds of CV per day, making sure that it’s your resume that gets the attention of the recruiter calls for implementation of the some extra measures. Here are some easy tips to make your CV stand apart from the crowd.

Frankly speaking, resume building is no rocket science, & yet we would find endless debates, discussions and commentaries about it everywhere on the web. Plenty of books have been written on the same, yet many of us fail to get the basics right.

Why Having a Unique Resume is Important?

Did you know that six seconds is all that is required for a recruiter to make the initial ‘fit or no fit decision” on candidates? An innovative research by The Ladders in 2012 revealed this fact about the recruiters’ decision-making behavior. That leaves everyone of us scratching our head about what one can do to his resume so as to ensure that it catches the attention of the recruiter in those six seconds and gets you an interview call.

Is it having a catchy objective, or a killer design, or innovative format? The answer could very well be, all of the above. Making a resume unique requires one to take a holistic approach to resume creation, taking into account all of the above factors and more.

The Easy Improvements

Getting the ‘Name’ Right: Most job seekers need to get this right. How many times have you seen a resume with a “Resume” or “Curriculum Vitae” occupying the prime position, at the top? Is it not too obvious to be stated? Honestly speaking, recruiters find it foolish. That space should be reserved for your name. But that’s only half the story. In the current digital age, every recruiter refers to some sort of social media profile of the candidate to be doubly sure. Thus, it wouldn’t hurt if you would also include the URL of your public LinkedIn profile right beside the name.

 Getting the Font Right: Although you teacher must have advised you back in school to type every official document in Times New Roman font,  for whatsoever reason, using the same in the current times would immediately date your resume by about 10 years. Although going too fancy isn’t recommended, you can definitely take the liberty of using more casual fonts such as Calibri amongst others. There are other dozens of modern fonts that come as a part of the Microsoft Word package (for instance, Verdana and Tahoma)

Getting the Length Right: One of the most important improvements that you can include in your resume is getting its length right. How? Well, for one you could stop including every single job that you have done on this planet in the CV. Your resume is similar to a sales pitch to the recruiter. Until you provide him with what he is looking for, all your experience and expertise is waste, at least for that particular job. Thus, your CV should be tailored perfectly to match the necessary requirements of the industry that you are going to make a career in.

Getting the Keywords Inside Your CV: With most recruiters now screening resumes through software, you should make sure to include keywords which are relevant to the job. In order to identify the specific keywords, you should examine the job listing; and the organization’s website. Study the LinkedIn profiles of individuals who have the same job title as what you are aspiring to be.

Creating a Resume that is Unconventional: There are plenty of CV formats doing the round these days. This includes PDF CVs, infographic CVs, and even video resumes. For instance, this guy Phillippe Dubost became an instant social celebrity overnight who was credited for creating the best resume ever. While one can’t expect everyone to be as creative as this guy, but a little bit of unique factor can be added by going into previously uncharted territory. Sometimes, the experiments can go horribly wrong, while at other times, the next thing you will know is that every recruiter in your industry is asking for your name.

Adding Hyperlinks: This is only for people who have to e-mail their resume to the recruiter. That pretty much includes a majority of the applicants. Adding links to your resume can help to showcase the employer your accomplishments in a better manner. However, while printing a hard copy, be intelligent enough to remove those hyperlinks from the draft.

A Sample of Infographic CV

These are some of the easy improvements for making your CV unique.