Your CV is the most important tool that you have to showcase your skills, capabilities, achievements and potential to a prospective employer.  For an employer, it’s a good reference point to start a conversation with you and explore areas that are important in the future role.  

What if we told you that a recruiter invests just 20 seconds in your CV to decide if they want to meet you or skip your profile altogether? Especially when the hiring happens from multiple campuses, a recruiter has to browse through hundreds of CVs and therefore would glance through each profile in about 20 seconds or less.  Here are some tips to make your CV more compelling and competitive for recruiters!

Customised for targeted roles –  Understand the job description (JD) that is offered and look for what skills are being requested for in the JD. Customise your CV to include those skills and experiences, if you have those. If your project demands conducting surveys and analysing the findings and if the JD demands analytics as a key skill, give more space to analytics and tools used to analyse the data with muted focus on how you designed the survey.

Loaded with Power Verbs – Use power verbs such as ‘Led’, ‘Implemented’, ‘Drove’, ‘Completed’ etc.  This will highlight your initiative and risk taking capabilities as well as give more data points to the recruiter for having meaningful conversation in the process. 

Outcome v/s Activity –  The recruiter is interested in evaluating the impact you have driven through your past experience and project work. While it’s good to mention the work you have done, do give equal space and weight to the outcomes you derived as part of the project.  Answer the question: how did the work/project help the organization in either reducing costs or improving TAT or mapping new markets or any other metric that was important to the organisation.  Highlight that prominently to attract the recruiters attention.

Give an honest account – Question everything you mention in the CV if it’s true.  Anything that you cannot speak on for less than 120 seconds without communicating the impact of learning derived can be easily skipped.  Also, be genuine and honest in whatever you write.  4 sentences written with authenticity and truth are more powerful than 8 that are not truthful. Do not try to fill your CV up, therefore, with irrelevant things for the recruiter.  

Finally, the recruiter is looking for skills that the organisation can easily leverage when you join them.  Skip strengths like honesty, hardworking, integrity etc.  These are given these days. Instead replace them with real skills that you can bring to the table.  Some examples include: Project Management skills, ability to simplify complex tasks, influencing skills etc. and back those up with real examples from your work life.