What Your CV Says About Your Career Without You Realizing It
Your CV tells a lot about your professional lifestyle. The way you write it and the information you put into it says a lot of things about you that you might have not purposely wanted to communicate.
A CV is the most likely what determines the first impression employers get from you. It shows your professional direction, level of experience, consistency and priorities before you get an interview. A CV can sometimes create an impression of you that you didn’t intend to make.
1. Your job titles communicate your career direction
Your job titles creates a picture of how your professional history has been.
Having experienced multiple roles means employers have to find what connects them to each other. Your CV can look uncoordinated if there isn’t any clear connection even when you have valuable experience.
Having different careers or jobs isn’t the problem, you have to be able to connect them with each other to make your CV more valuable.
2. Your most recent experience carries significant weight
Your most recent experience tells your employer a lot about you. It gets a lot of attention because it gives your employer more recent information about your abilities.
Employers might question how suitable you are for the job in the beginning if your most recent job doesn’t match the kind of job you’re applying for.
This is where display of your most transferable skills is needed. This can happen if you use your most recent transferable skills to dominate your CV rather than your older experience.
3. The length of your CV can communicate something
The length of your CV is also a very essential part of CV that tells your recruiter a lot about you and your professional identity.
Sometimes a short CV tells your employer that you don’t have a lot of experience, this might also not be the case.
A very long CV makes you look like you don’t know what to put on your CV or you just don’t know how to identify what is important to the position you are applying for.
You shouldn’t focus on how to make your CV as long or short as possible. Try to apply the most relevant information to your CV to show how qualified you are without stressing the reader.
4. Your bullet points reveal whether you focus on duties or achievements
Only stating what you where responsible for makes you look like a task focused individual.
A CV that tells more about what you accomplished, the kind of development you created, gives your employer clear evidence of your value.
This is the necessity of being able to quantify your work. Numbers provide tangible results of how you can handle responsibilities and gives way for easier understanding of your contributions.
5. Your skills section reveals what you think you are good at
Your CV is based off of the information you deem fit necessary to be on your professional application. Your skills section shows your employer abilities you consider important.
Broad terminologies like hardworking or leadership doesn’t give your recruiter real understanding of your professional skills
Using skills that are specifically tailored to fit the job requirements gives a clearer view of professional identity.
Skills should also always be backed up by experience. Experience that doesn’t demonstrates how you applied your skills makes your abilities look false.
6. Your career progression can be visible even without saying it
Your CV shows how your responsibilities may have evolved over time.
Increasing responsibility, more complex work, leadership responsibilities, promotions or movement into specialised positions shows your employer that you have actual professional development.
Movement doesn’t necessarily have to be linear. It could be sideways, changing industries, taking a career break or returning to an earlier type of role.
Your CV should demonstrate how all these changes happened instead of allowing the recruiter to guess.
7. Frequent job changes create a pattern
Multiple short lived jobs can make an employer a bit sceptical about your employment history.
Hiding these changes isn’t what’s necessary, what matters is how you place them on your CV.
Contract work, temporary positions, seasonal employment, internships, project-based work and career transitions give your employer a clearer understanding instead of constantly stating how you left permanent position with no explanation.
When you state these appropriately it makes the nature of those roles more uncomfortable.
8. Gaps in employment can also communicate something
Having a gap in your employment isn’t an automatic sign that you won’t get the job. If you don’t explain the gap then you’re giving your employer incomplete information.
It basicly depends on how you choose to explain how you spent your time during that period of time, this prevents any part of your career journey from looking confusing.
9. Your education section can reveal your career direction
The kind of qualifications you have helps you build a professional foundation.
Your degree, certifications and training should show that you are focused on a particular field, this gives a clearer view of the kind of professional direction you are headed for.
This doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing if your education and work experience don’t match. It only means your CV has to show how you connect through transferable skills, additional training or relevant experience.
10. Your CV also reveals what you choose to leave out
The style of your CV shows what you decide to focus on.
The kind of information you put on your CV shows your recruiter what you consider important. The style of your CV is very relevant to how your recruiter sees you.
A CV isn’t just suppose to contain every information about your experience, it’s also about choosing the information that deserves to be focused on.
Your CV shouldn’t just be a compilation of your whole professional history, it should be tailored in an intentional manner so your employer can be able to understand your application easily. This gives your employer all the good reasons to call you back for an interview.
