5 CV Tips To Stand Out

Your CV (which stands for Curriculum Vitae) is your biggest opportunity to land an interview for your dream job. But what makes a good CV? A good CV should highlight your skills, achievements, experiences and qualifications, and show recruiters and potential employers that you’re the ideal person for the job.

Presenting your best self on paper can be tough. In this article, we will be sharing our CV tips to help you stand out and increase your chances of a job interview.

Tailor your CV to each job you apply for to maximise your chances of being shortlisted by recruiters, employers, and Applicant Tracking Systems.

Applicant Tracking Systems (or ATS) are used by larger companies to automate the screening process. ATS scans hundreds of CVs for specific keywords and shortlists ones that are a match.

Read through the job description and take note of the keywords and key skills mentioned, include relevant ones in your personal statement, work experiences and skills section. This will help optimise your CV for search engines, so that you are easily found by recruiters and employers.

Recruiters spend a mere 6 seconds reviewing a CV to determine suitability before moving on to the next. Your personal statement or opening statement is a career summary at the top of the page that summarise your character and career goals. Here’s how to write a strong personal statement:

Include your most relevant achievement in your personal statement – this immediately conveys success and portrays you in a positive light.

Mention personal and professional achievements under work experiences, instead of listing responsibilities. This could help you land an interview so that the employer can learn more about you.

• Personal achievements: receiving an award, winning a competition, volunteering, achieving high grades in studies
• Professional achievements: saved the company time and money, increased performance, met and exceeded work targets

Remember to include metrics to help communicate success to the reader, see our next tip.

Your experiences sit beneath your personal statement. They should be an accurate account of your employment history with your most recent work experience at the top. Another CV tip is to keep it under two pages, we recommend using bullet points to list your experiences.

In this section, focus on your accomplishments to show that you’ve made a positive impact. Avoid listing workplace duties and responsibilities.

A great way to communicate success is to include Key Performance Indicators (KPI). State your most eye-catching results on paper as numbers, percentages, or other measurable metrics. Make sure you include time frame, scale, and results. This will help the recruiter or employer assess your ability to do a job.

If you can do this successfully, you increase your chances of getting shortlisted for an interview.

Strengthen your CV by using action verbs in your list of accomplishments.

What is an action verb?

Action verbs are verbs that convey doing.

For example, an IT professional may want to use “configured”, “engineered”, “converted” as they are more powerful and industry specific.

The goal here is to convince the recruiter that you are fit for the position. Using action verbs at the beginning of sentences makes your contribution clear and impactful and can increase the reader’s interest.

If you aren’t quite sure how to use action verbs in your CV and interviews, check out Indeed’s Career Guide which includes over 150 examples!

Our last CV tip – first impressions count. Your CV should be concise and neatly formatted so that recruiters and ATS can find what they are looking for.

We recommend creating a CV in Word or in PDF format as both offer readability and are ATS-friendly.

Before you start applying for jobs, check that your personal information is up-to-date and consistent with your LinkedIn profile. Any inaccuracies between the two sends a red flag to recruiters!