February 11, 2011 at 6:54 pm
filed under Uncategorized
These are my thoughts, not those of my employer
I’m reading quite a lot of CVs at the moment. Here’s what I think is important.
Keep it to about two pages when printed. I can’t stress enough the improbability of an unfocussed eleven pager making it past the initial CV filtering process. I do actually print CVs out and scribble on them rather than reading off the screen.
Unless you are a very recent graduate it’s not overly important to me if you got a B+ in your Geography GSCE in 1992. Tell me (briefly) if you got ten straight A’s or were awarded a scholarship, but please don’t list every exam result you’ve ever had.
List your jobs in reverse chronological order. It’s weird how some CVs start with what they were doing in 1995. Fine if you invented the cure for the common cold and won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Not fine for less significant events.
I’m no good at spelling, and worse at grammar, so I don’t care overly if the CV has the odd hard to parse sentence, but make an effort. Spellcheck it at least.
Include a URL to some code you wrote. You are applying for a programming job.
Writing this is pretty meaningless :-
Am I to think that you have over 92 man-years of experience in your short career or that you’ve stuck a lot of buzzwords in your CV to fish for work? Separate out what you think you really are good at, probably things you’ve been doing on a daily basis for few years. Then mention the few other relevant things you’ve got decent exposure to. The clue as to what to leave in/out will be in the job ad.
On that note, doing this is even worse (taken from an otherwise great CV) :-
PHP OOP, Zend Framework, MVC, Drupal, XML, XSD, XSL, DOM, Xpath, Smarty, Pear, XMLRPC, SOAP, Lucene, Sphinx, SOLR, Cassandra, Thrift, MySQL (foreign keys, optimisation, indexing), ORM (Active Record), Properl, Doctrine, Caching, Memcache, OAuth, Apache auth (basic, digest) EC2, S3, MongoDB, TDD, RAD, Agile, PHPUnit, Xdebug, LAMP, Apache (Linux config, mod_rewrite, system admin, testing, stats - Munin), Tomcat, SVN, Git, Eclipse, Aptana, JEE, Spring Framework, MVC, Hibernate, Tomcat, JUnit, Quartz, Velocity, SOAP, Maven, Ant, Netbeans, Eclipse, Query, Prototype, Ajax, Comet, Mootools, DOM, Behaviour scripting, HTML 5 (canvas), CSS, Mail (SMTP, IMAP, POP3), DNS, DHCP, SSH, Telnet, FTP, Database Server (Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, LiteSQL), Apache, TOMCAT, PHP Server, Ruby on Rails configuration, Memacached, SVN Server …
It’s recruitment spam. Don’t do it.
Also, don’t cut bits and pieces out of the job description and insert them in your personal statement. I’ll spot it.
A four page CV mentioned the word PHP no less than twenty-nine times.
Some people think I need every technical acronym expanding. RDBMS becomes, “relational database management system (RDBMS)”. It’s not necessary.
Irrelevant stuff. Bartender, ice-cream van driver, gardener, please don’t mention jobs that aren’t related to the one advertised. Some people put the fact they have a clean driving license on their CV. The job doesn’t involved driving, or cars.
I don’t really read the personal interests section. I think I might be sociopathic.
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