Effective CV Development with Sandy Gibbs

Q&A from the webinar

1. How many years of detail should you go back in your career?

Regarding position detail, the rule of thumb is to cover the past 5-7 years or 2-3 positions, whichever is greater. The last 5-7 years supersedes what you have done previously and will also be most relevant to what you do going forward. However, it’s still important to detail your entire career. What you decide to take out, could have been of great interest to the reader. This is where the page 1 Career Overview comes in to play and is a super short/succinct method to cover your entire career.

2. What if you have been contracting and have many short term roles - do you combine them all?

This can be tricky depending on the volume of contracting you have done, the length of contracts, and if contracts are mixed amongst permanent roles. If there are a number of contracts across one key period of your career, the best option is to head it up as ‘Contract Roles’, and then list the details of the key projects during that time-span. Do try to keep it in chronological order.  If it’s just the odd contract between, then again, keep them in order between your permanent roles and in brackets make note they were a contract. This helps explain shorter tenure etc.

3. Is it better to start from Skills section in resume than from Work Experience? Do I need to include achievements in the Skills Section?

After a career overview, achievements are definitely the next best option – as this is your sales pitch.  What you can do, is list your achievements based on the skill it’s demonstrating, if you prefer to have it this way.  This then covers quantified results but correlates it with the core skill required to achieve that outcome.

4. Where should your education be mentioned on CV?

For degrees and diplomas, on page 1. Many roles require a qualification, or ideally want a qualification. If you identify this upfront on page 1, then it will aid quick selection, and help you be un-rejectable. Courses and Certificates should be listed at the back under Personal Development. If however you have been certified in something such as PrinceII, or are a qualified Scrum Master, you would make sure this was on page 1, if the positions you are going for require this certification. It’s thinking about what the role is asking for, and what you need to evidence quickly for the reader.

5. How do you deal with a gap in CV?

This is where the Career Overview can really help. It allows you to simply write “overseas travel”, “sabbatical”, “career break”, “parental leave” instead of a company name. You then pop in an explanatory note under the position column – eg. Travelled through South East Asia before returning home to NZ.  In the right-hand dates column, you add the period of time.

6. Can you please explain the ATS friendly CV process again? 

To mitigate any risk, we recommend:

Do not hide important information in headers and footers

Use a word document where you can

Don’t get too carried away with fancy design – use tabbed and bullets, versus tables

Here is a link to the article I was referring to from our website: https://www.tribegroup.com/job-seekers/helpful-advice/read-is-your-cv-ats-friendly/

There are also many free ATS scanners you can use (e.g. https://resumeworded.com/resume-scanner)

7. If you have a word document and convert it into a PDF to send - is this still ATS friendly?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a universally correct answer to this question! The best answer would probably be that it depends on where and how you’re sending your resume. We would suggest following application instructions (if the company is asking for specific filetypes) otherwise you are generally safe (if following the criteria above) submitting a Word or PDF formatted CV.

8. Is it important to include “Visa status” in the very top of the Resume? Or is it better to omit this data in the very beginning of resume?

You will generally find that the Visa status requires verification during the application process, therefore it shouldn’t generally be required on your CV. If however there are special conditions of your Visa that is favorable to mention, you may wish to include this. It is a little case by case, depending on the requirement of the role you are applying for.

9. How many referees should you have on your CV? Professional vs Personal?

2 previous Managers or Supervisors is ideal and generally the most relevant, however referee information is not recommended if your job search is confidential or if there is any conflict of interest.

Names, and titles are all we recommend, with a note that contact details will be provided upon request.  It is important to request that they are not contacted prior to your approval.

There is no hard and fast rule, however there is a nice confidence demonstrated when you are comfortable to share your referees, no matter what job process you progressing. Some referees may also have a great reputation in the industry, or be an upstanding community member – it can be positive to identify the association with them (especially at more senior levels).

10. Should you have a summary of your top 8 achievements on page 1?

There is no rule of thumb around how many achievements, but yes, as previously covered, it is ideal to have these starting on page 1. However achievements must include results and outcomes to highlighting evidence of your capability.

11. I struggle with identifying and highlighting my "Achievements" vs responsibility paragraphs. How can I go about this, if you don't have "Best Saleperson of the month" type of clear achievements?

Responsibilities are the job tasks you were employed to do. Achievements are the outcomes you specifically enabled while you were doing that job task. This can be small things like “initiating a new process for managing complaints, increasing the speed of our response rate by over 40%, also resulting in a reduction of direct calls to Managers”. Think about what you are proud of. Use words like “developed”, “created”, “identified” etc. This can be a difficult process at any level. Tribe offer various workshops, one being to help build your ability to ‘Skills Assess’.  Skills Assessment is a key component to building confidence in your achievements and therefore, your CV development and interviewing.

12. Where should you put the key skills and attributes?

Skills and Attributes can be highlighted through an effective achievements section. You can summarise them, but remember a summary is a snapshot of information already provided, therefore a brief summary of skills and attributes could be included nearer the back if you wanted to. The evidence of your skills and attributes is best demonstrated in achievements, where you provide results that you have initiated, enabled, achieved, empowered etc.

13. Could you summarise again page 1:

Page 1 should include your name and personal contact details,  Qualifications, a Career Overview, and it will likely include the start of your Achievements section.

14. What about a personal summary statement and objective at the top of page 1 of your CV?

They are not essential and are very much an individual preference.  They must be succinct, and factual, versus subjective statements. They should also be short.  We don’t believe that objectives are necessarily of value as they may not align to the reader’s need. Again, all of this comes back to our comment that you don’t know who the reader is, therefore be mindful of what you could be judged on.

15. How do you highlight achievements if you're a software developer that works on multiple projects with different colleagues?

You can talk about the specific outcomes and deliverables within a project, project timeline/milestone achievements, managing multiple timelines and client results – possibly across different sectors, ideas you had to do things differently for a stakeholder and the result of that, coming up to speed quickly and how that impacted an outcome. As per an earlier example provided, think about the things you are proud of while in a job. Consider using words like developed, created, initiated, identified, systemised etc – along with results or outcomes achieved.

16. My CV is now 7 pages long and I have tried to cut it down over the years but because I'm a contractor I find it very hard to do so. What is the ideal length of your cv?

4 pages is the recommended maximum. See the earlier answer with regard to using the Career Overview on page 1 for your full career,  while only extending on the detail of the last 5-7 years.