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What are your plans this holiday? I hope unwinding, getting some well-deserved rest and catching up with friends and family make it onto your top three. But the holidays are also a relaxed, no-pressure time to catch up with your networks, review your year and most importantly, re-look your CV in a relaxed setting.
This is especially important if you feel stuck in a rut or if you’re still on the hunt for your dream job. And when you do get round to sparing some time for your job search efforts, ensure you look into the following areas.
Leadership qualities
Does your CV portray you as a leader? It does not matter whether you have worked for one or ten years – you have a higher chance of being taken more seriously if you are able to show leadership potential or leadership traits. How do you do this? Find places on your resume where you can use key phrases such as spearheaded, pioneered, transformed, optimised, negotiated etc. However, it is not enough to use the words, follow up these words by showing what kind of results you got. Quantify these results in shillings, or impact and especially mention awards or recognition you got for an initiative or role that you led.
Link your profiles
If it is relevant, say for a social media position, add in your Twitter or website to your CV. But if you’re unsure, leave them out and only include LinkedIn. Most importantly, ensure the link is live so that if someone clicks on it they will be taken straight to your profile. However, this also means your profile has to be consistent with your CV, and that both need to be up to date. It is also possible to create a custom URL if using the generic version is too messy, instructions on how to do this are on the LinkedIn website.
Readability
Increase the readability of your CV by making it relevant and as short as possible. Get rid of date of birth, marital status, religion, and move your education to below experience unless you’re a recent graduate with no work experience. Get rid of abbreviations that are only understood in your field – they are confusing and even worse, tracking software might miss them out.
Restrict your bullet points to a maximum of six. Anything longer than that and the reader will skim over them without reading. Make the bullet points as short as possible while at the same time ensuring they make sense. Read over your bullet points once you’re done and get rid of overused words, substitute any word that appears more than once in the same section.
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