Put yourself in the shoes of your friendly neighbourhood recruiter who arrives at his desk bright eyed and bushy tailed at 8:30 one Monday morning to find 150 responses to that advertisement he placed on Friday afternoon for an ITIL Service Delivery Manager. He now has the unenviable task of going through each of those CVs to find the best three to put forward to his client by 5:00pm the same day.

Being only human the first approach is a quick "skim"and the CVs tend to go one of three ways - YES, MAYBE, NO

Your only purpose in submitting your CV is to ensure that your CV goes in the YES column.

Think of your CV in terms of "screens" (not pages) because that's what the recruiter is going to look at when he opens your CV. So you need to be absolutely sure to include the information that will make him say "YES" when he views that first screen.

Please don't write one of those CVs that fill the entire first screen with absolutely useless information. If you write CURRICULUM VITAE in 18 point characters across the top with your name and address on 5 separate lines followed by a lengthy list of your GCSE O and A level results, not to mention your clean driving licence and the fact that you are a non smoker you will have filled the entire first screen without saying anything that will persuade our recruiter to read on.

That CV might go on to say that you are a Guru of the Service Delivery World but unfortunately it's probably already gone into the NO file.

You must place key information about your skills, experience and achievements into the first screen of your CV, otherwise it probably won't get read.

So here are some fundamental rules for writing your CV.

Rule number 1

Do use a clear type face. This is entirely a matter of choice but most serif type faces (like Times New Roman) were designed to look nice on the printed page whereas our expectation is that most recipients will now be reading your CV on a computer screen. So the rule is to keep your typeface nice and clear. My recommendation would be Arial or Helvetica.

Rule number 2

Don't waste 5 separate lines writing your name and address. You can start off with your name in about a 14 point followed by your address and contact details including your e-mail address in 8 point on the next 2 lines. Only use two lines for your address and contact details, you can't afford to waste this valuable space.

Rule number 3

Following your name and contact details the next item should be your PROFILE.

This is the single most important part of your CV.

You need to write a very concise profile of who you are and what you do. I suggest you use no more than six lines and this "body text" should ideally be in 10 point. This profile is most likely to be what the recruiter reads straightaway. If it doesn't match his job requirement he's going to put you in the "NO" folder.

So you must try to tailor the profile to the specific job that you are applying for. Remember our recruiter is looking for key words from his job spec.

Let's assume that, in part, his job spec (and the job advertisement) is asking for:

ITIL Certification -Strong Team Management -Strong experience of Service Delivery Management -Strong track record of Financial Services

Your PROFILE needs to reflect at least this experience. For example:

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

PROFILE

A highly skilled Service Delivery Manager with the ITIL Service Management Expert Certification. Fully conversant with the latest IT innovations, delivering solutions which utilise cutting-edge technologies. Currently managing a team of ten and with a strong track record of success in the Financial Services Sector. This experience is complimented by strong analytical, problem solving and communication skills.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

That profile will almost certainly encourage our Recruiter to read on and will probably get that candidate short-listed for the Service Delivery Manager role.

Remember the first "screen" of the first page of your CV is what really counts. It's all the recruiter is going to look at initially and he's probably only going to look for about 10 seconds. I strongly recommend that you tailor this  Profile to each specific job application. I'm not suggesting that you distort your experience and I'm assuming that you wouldn't be applying for the job unless you have the basic skills required, but you do need to ensure that the contents of your Profile reflect the requirements of the particular job you are applying for. What you are doing is making the recruiter's job as easy as possible. Make sure you give him what he's looking for!

Now let's move on down the first page of your CV. Following your PROFILE you need to add roughly five Key Achievements that provide evidence to support the Profile you have written. These need to be impressive and I would suggest that you write them cliche free. Instead they need to be solid achievements that are relevant to the role that you are applying for and that will be meaningful to your potential employer.

For example:

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

KEY ACHIEVEMENTS

• Managed the deployment of a new ITIIL compliant Problem and Incident Reporting process to 50 staff across 10 UK locations that dramatically improved call resolution and customer satisfaction ratings. Project brought in on time and budget.
• Developed an intranet site which provided a community of 100 Service Delivery Managers with access to essential resources and data and offered an invaluable platform for information exchange and knowledge sharing. Received the Company Innovation Award 2007.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

 Selecting these key achievements is really important and will also get you thinking about what you have really achieved in your career and more importantly what will get you that interview.

Ideally you should have a "library" of at least 10 key achievements and place the five that you feel are most appropriate in the list for each job application. These key achievements will also provide useful ammunition for questions at interview.

The next important section should be a matrix of your technical skills. I would recommend grouping these by category. (eg. Operating Systems, Development Tools, RDBMS etc.)

From this point on you can start to list your jobs. Don't use obscure job titles that are unique to your organisation but will be meaningless to other employers. My advice would be to modify job titles so that they are clearly understandable and indicate exactly what you did in the job.

Make sure that you list five or six key achievements for each job and of course you can include your full "library" of Key Achievements used earlier in the CV.

Always state clearly why you left each job and make sure that that you account for the whole of your career and that there are no blank periods. If you took a 6 month planned career break to renovate your house then say so, don't leave a blank.

The final part of your CV should include your Education and Professional Training and your Personal Details which should include your Nationality. If you are not a British or an EU Citizen then you need to indicate on what basis you are able to work in the UK.

Remember that you do not need to include your date of birth. Because of the Age Discrimination Act recruiters should not ask for your age, although bear in mind that employers are entitled to know your date of birth at the time they offer you a position.

In some respects these guidelines are written for a very conventional CV and of course there are lots of opportunities for innovation and development in this area. For example you might want to place your CV on your personal web site or social networking site and include graphics, video clips etc. however what you have here is a basic working CV that will get you interviews with the majority of recruiters / employers in the UK and that should be your objective.

It's over to you!

1. Give yourself an iteration length. I find that timeboxes help me focus my work, and they will help you too. If you feel overwhelmed, make a list of the tasks or accomplishments you want to complete in a timebox, such as one or two weeks. Now, you can go ahead and do those tasks.
2. Know what tasks you've accomplished and what you still have left to do. If you thought you would send out 20 resumes and you did, celebrate that. This means you need to track your work in some way. Use a spreadsheet or stickies on the wall, something that helps you see accomplished work.
3. Ask for a review. Just as you would ask for a review of your technical work, ask someone to review your resume, and maybe even your cover letter, if you have common pieces of your cover letter for multiple positions.
4. If you ask every potential employer some common questions, write them down, so you have them available to you. This is like the checklists or standard things you do in a software project.
5. Know when to stop with a particular position. You'll send a bunch of resumes that may not even be answered. Decide how many times you might inquire about your resume. Stop after that number.
6. Make sure you write thank you notes after an interview.
7. If you have an extended job search, consider a retrospective every few weeks to see if you could try anything different in your search.
   

Layout & Margins

Keep your margins generous. There's nothing worse than too much information crammed into a small space - long line lengths will hamper readability. It is best to have ample space on all sides, with the bottom margin generally being the largest.

If in doubt, keep the default. In most situations, you'll want to preserve the default margin settings. In most applications the default margin settings will be optimal for the paper size you specify. 

Consider columns for presentation. Certain sections of your CV, such as your work or education history, will benefit from a columnar layout. Doing so can provide a more logical, yet compact approach. Avoid splitting long paragraphs over columns - keep columns for summarised information, and stick to paragraphs for longer text.

Keep spacing between elements - particularly between sections where you've used a different layout (i.e. the transition from columns to paragraphed text). Whitespace helps keep the distinction between different sections, and is particular important if you're varying the layout style.

Tools

The tools you use will reflect in the final output and format of your CV. Much will depend on which tools you have available, but it's good to be aware of the alternatives.

Emphasis

Your CV cannot comprise of two sides plain, unadorned text - you need to break a potential essay into easily digestible chunks. Careful use of headings, breaks and other tricks can help break up a wall of text into a beautiful hierarchy of naturally presented information.

A larger type size is the perfect way to draw the reader's eye to headings - and coupled with a judicious amount of spacing will serve to break the document in a pleasing fashion. It's best not to use too large a font, however - just a few points more will suffice. If your body text is 8 or 10pt, your headings should be somewhere about 16pt in size - no more than double the size of your body text.

Underlines and outlines can also help - if used judiciously. I'd probably recommend against using text underlines in most circumstances (italics is best for emphasis), but a page rule (a line across the page) can make for an effective page break, particularly for a major section break or following columnar or tabular data.

Bold and italic are also two very important tools in your emphatic arsenal - headings should be bold where suitable, and certain passages in text can be highlighted in bold. Italics serve less as a highlight and more as a softer emphasis - for instance, in cases where a certain differentiation from the body text is required but not to the degree that bold would provide.

Avoid colour emphasis. For many of the reasons that I mentioned in the last post regarding the usage of colour - notably reproduction difficulty - but also for issues of readability and a lack of convention - colour has never historically been a source of emphasis in text, and today colour tends to be used for interactive elements (i.e. hyperlinks in web documents) rather than to provide an accent.

As with so many aspects of CV design, the trick is to be conservative - black and white trumps colour, simpler layouts and more compact structure are best, and classical typefaces are the ones to stick to. There's really no reason to attempt anything too avant-garde, when the basics are really all you need - get the basics right and you'll stand out more than you might otherwise suspect.

1. Make sure your reference can talk on the phone. If you choose a reference who hates talking on the phone, you are not going to get a good reference. It doesn't matter what they say, if they 'erm' and 'err' and sound slow to respond, you will not get the reference you need.
2. Choose someone who can talk about the value of your work. If you choose someone who says, "Oh, yes, Tim worked here," and stops, what good is that? Even saying, "Tim was our release engineer," does not show value. Contrast that to this statement: "Tim worked on my project for 6 months. In that time, he showed me the value of continuous integration, and helped influence all the other developers into really doing continuous integration. I don't know how we would have finished the project when we did without his nudging and cajoling us into it." 
3. Choose some colleagues, and at least one manager. If you've had multiple jobs, ask multiple colleagues and multiple managers. Two or three managers and three colleagues is a good number.