With youth unemployment levels pushing one million, you don’t need us to tell you how fiercely competitive the graduate jobs market is these days. Getting overlooked in the application process is an all too common lament from newly qualified university leavers. Record numbers of applicants each vying for the same role means your CV has to demonstrate – in 15 seconds no less – how you’re not only perfectly attuned to the employer’s needs, but that you’ve got infinitely more to offer than the hundreds of other hopefuls. Sounds like a pretty tall order, doesn’t it? Not if you follow these guidelines.

There are four essential elements your CV must set out to show:

1. What position are you seeking and what are you qualified to do that will be of value to your potential employer?
2. What future results do you anticipate producing for your new employer that will set you apart from the other candidates?
3. What skills do you possess that will enable you to produce these results?
4. What successes have you achieved in the past that back up your claims?

Any professional CV writer worth their salt will tell you how important it is to analyse your chosen role and identify the potential employer’s bottom line needs. Once these have been established you need to tailor your CV accordingly. It’s not a case of simply listing your achievements and hoping for the best; it should be a strategic and highly targeted approach. Simply but effectively, your CV needs to demonstrate how you, your skills and your history are perfectly matched to the requirements of the role. It’s important to focus on your ‘differentiating factors’; emphasising your unique characteristics and why, out of all the applicants, you deserve to make the final grade. From thereon in your CV becomes your very own finely-tuned marketing tool, clearly demonstrating how you stand out head and shoulders from the crowd.  What’s more, having a clear picture of your achievements is invaluable at interview. It enables you to clearly articulate your past successes and how you believe you can add value to your future employer.
At City CV our professional CV writers have extensive graduate experience. We help our clients to identify past achievements even when their work experience is limited. We deliver results and consistently exceed expectations. For more information, a free CV review or to discuss how we can help you, call us on 0207 979 7718 or email enquiries@citycv.co.uk Find more tips on securing your dream job at www.citycv.co.uk To read about Victoria McLean, the founder of City CV, go to http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/victoria-mclean/a/b9b/300

Rejected again? Could it be down to your looks? According to the Daily Telegraph and msn.com, researchers have been investigating the effect of photos on CVs with some interesting results:

-   An ugly man would have to send twice as many CVs as a handsome one to secure a response

-   Pretty women are twice as likely to be refused a job interview as unattractive ones

-   CVs from women that included photos were 30% less likely to get a response, whether or not the women were attractive.

The Telegraph assert that a team from Ben Gurion University sent more than 5000 CVs in reply to job advertisements to see how beauty affects the hiring process in the real job market. The Economists sent pairs of applications to 2656 jobs across 10 different fields. Although identical in content, one CV did not have a photograph, and the other a picture of either an attractive or unattractive man or woman.

MEN: Attractive males received a 19.9% call back rate, almost 50% higher than the 13.7% response for a plain looking man and more than twice the 9.2% response for those with no photo.

WOMEN: With women, the reverse was true. Those with no picture had the highest call back rate, 22% higher than plain women and 30% higher than attractive women.

That good-looking women were passed over for interviews “was surprising,” said study leader Bradley Ruffle, an economics researcher and lecturer at Ben-Gurion University. The finding contradicts research that shows that good-looking people are typically viewed as smarter, kinder and more talented than those who are less attractive, he said.

But Daniel S. Hamermesh, professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, “wasn’t totally surprised,” noting that other studies, including one of his own, have found beauty a liability in the workplace. “I call this the ‘Bimbo Effect,’” said Hamermesh, considered an authority on the association between beauty and the labor market.

The current study appears online on the Social Science Research Network.

As reported by msn.com, the apparent bias against attractive women depended on the type of employer that reviewed the resumes. Employment agencies called pretty women as often as plain ones, and only slightly less than women who didn’t include a photo. But when the resumes were screened directly by the company at which the candidate might work, those from attractive women received half the response of those from either plain women or women who didn’t include photos.

Hypothesizing that human resource departments are staffed mostly by women who feel jealous of attractive women in the workplace, the researchers called each company to speak to the person who had reviewed the resumes. In this post-study survey, they found that 24 out of 25 were women.

The researchers also learned that the resume-screeners tended to be young and single, “qualities that are more likely to be associated with jealousy,” said Ruffle.

Hamermesh wasn’t convinced of the hypothesis, noting that the women trying to fill the open position were unlikely to work in the same division as the applicant, attractive or not. “The researchers were not able to really test this. It was just an interesting hypothesis,” he said.

In a 1998 study, Hamermesh and co-author Jeff Biddle found that good looks enhanced the likelihood that a male attorney would make partner early, but reduced that likelihood for the most attractive women.

While attractive women received fewer callbacks, those who make it to the interview stage still might land the job, the study said. The resume-screener might not be the interviewer, and even if they are one and the same, the “pretty woman” bias might fade during a face-to-face interview.

Recruitment and HR professionals look at vast numbers of CVs each day. Your CV has literally seconds to provide them with the information that they need to decide whether to take you through to interview.  Make sure that you check and re-check the document that you send through – many CVs are culled because of simple things such as formatting errors, poor grammar or spelling mistakes.

The best format for your CV is in either Word or PDF.   If you do send through a PDF document use a PDF creator that allows for text selection. This is because recruiters will often take bits of your CV to send through to prospective employers rather than the whole version.

Important points to remember:

.                     Avoid busy fonts. Stick with a clear, easy to read type-face

.                     Don’t use bright or loud colours. For the most part these will tend to put the reader off rather than capture attention

.                     Use bullet points to break up the text and guide the eye through the document

.                     Use headings and subheadings to break up paragraphs

.                     Avoid using dense language or long sentences

.                     Don’t use gimmicks or effects such as borders unless you are absolutely sure that they will not corrupt when sending through the document

.                     Only use one or two fonts throughout, chopping and changing can be distracting for the reader

.                     Don’t use pictures or photographs

.                     Keep your CV to a reasonable length – two A4 pages of 10-12 point sized font at the most (if you are an IT professional, your CV can be longer)

.                     Keep it simple, avoid waffle and ensure it is easy on the eye with plenty of white space

If you’re not confident your CV will beat the competition, call Victoria on 020 7979 7718 for a free CV review and/or to discuss having your CV professionally written