How to write a CV
I found myself reviewing CVs again this morning for some of our open positions (a C# developer position and a student job opening for the summer). Everytime I review CVs (or resumes as they are called across the Atlantic) I am amazed at the variety in content. I presume there are hundreds of sites out there which give tips on writing CVs. Colleges might want to consider giving a short course in how to write a CV (maybe they do already, do Irish colleges do this?) – I mean maybe an hour or 2 on what people should put in.
So what do employers look for in CVs? I’m afraid there is no magic formula for ensuring you get a job with your CV. You’re only going to get called for an interview if the content of your CV seems to meet the requirements for the job. Some employers may use some sort of scoring mechanism to determine this, while others may use some sort of fuzzy Do they fit the job? type criteria. Either way, here’s tip no 1.
Give the reviewer enough information to determine if you meet the requirements.
Seriously. If you’re applying for a programming job, tell me about your programming skills. If you’re a student, I know you don’ have 10 years of industry experience – but hopefully you’ve spent some productive time sitting in front of computers, doing assignments and thinking a little about software development. Make this clear on your CV – from giving me some details about what projects you’ve written to including some information about what operating systems you’ve used. If you tell me you use Linux and leave it at that, I’m going to decide you didn’t know what distribution you were using.
Ok, so you’ve got 5 pages of a CV detailing your experience with programming languages. If you find yourself in this situation, well done! You’ve overcome the first hurdle and you’ve told us about yourself. Now the bad news, you’ve got to have some consideration for the reviewer. He or she probably doesn’t have the time to read 10 to 20 submissions each running to 5 pages. So here’s tip no. 2.
Your CV should be no more than 3 pages, and ideally 2.
It’s hard to delete stuff from a CV. You spent a lot of time pulling all this information together, and you’re really proud of that summer job you had 6 years ago, but trust me, it won’t lose you the programming job. Hopefully you’ve had enough relevant experiences in the meantime to let that go. This brings us to tip no. 3.
Customise your CV to the position you’re applying for.
This is a side-effect of tip no. 2. If you had 10 pages, you could clearly list all of your experiences and skills in a myriad of areas. But you don’t. So when you’re applying for a programming job, I want to mostly hear about your past experiences as a programmer. If you’re applying for a system administration job, tell me about your experiences as a system administrator. By all means, mention you that spent your time 50/50 as a programmer/administrator – but then give me the details of whichever experience matters most.
Our final tip for today,
Don’t say anything on your CV that you can’t back up in an interview.
The worst thing you can do is give the interviewer the impression that you have skills that you don’t have. The guy or girl, in an interview, that can expand Java to 3 or 4 interesting projects including some interesting technologies and a discussion of things that went well and badly creates a much better impression than the person that says Enterprise Java Development on their CV, and subsequently has problems discussing basic Java topics.
There’s no magic formula – just some common-sense guidelines. So get your CV in to us – careers@aplpi.com and we can discuss the content at your interview 🙂
6 Comments to How to write a CV
Here is a good article on writing a cv:
http://www.ir35calc.co.uk/Writing_Killer_CV.aspx
I spent a least a whole day reviewing and ringing people regarding their CV’s last week. Personally what I would have loved is nothing but a link to the persons CV online, with clickthru ability on their employment history, projects skills etc…
Or maybe a one sheet mind map? 🙂
JJJuly 20, 2006
An related article about bad tech cvs:
http://tickletux.wordpress.com/2006/07/19/tech-cvs-the-lies-the-lies/
Stephen MulcahyJuly 25, 2006
A single day reviewing CVs doesn’t seem too bad. From a companies point of view, its not that expensive, especially considering the potential costs if you go and hire the wrong person.
I’m not sure an online hyperlinked CV would make reviewing it any easier – I mean the hard part is trying to build up a decent mental picture of what kind of person the candidate is, what motivates them and how well they’ll fit into your organisation.
As for mind maps – I dunno. I still find a whiteboard far more natural for “mind-mapping” than any of the tools I’ve come across.
David O'DowdMarch 7, 2008
Universities do have CV courses. At least they do in the University of Limerick. I personally did a Behavioral Technology course. But these are optional classes and as such everyone does not have to do them. This is one reason for such a large variation on the formats used for CV’s. I also believe soft skills are an important skill set/competency not discussed enough on software engineer CV’s, these skills are espically important in a consultant such as yours. But these skills are always important as you have to work with others in teams.
My personal view is that I my college experiences have given me the information I need to learn the skills I need within the environment I will work in after graduation. My areas of interest are more in the line of a systems analyst than a developer. Focusing on understanding business processes, collecting requirements and testing. But I also have a passion to expand my development knowledge in order to better understand each stage of the lifecycle. I would however say that I have a better understanding of the high level object oriented concepts than implementing these concepts within java. I believe the most important thing for a graduate to have after leaving college ( could be biased here as I am graduating soon ) is not specifics on projects done but do they have the soft skills required and the drive to learn the required information to work in industry as these cannot be thought ( lots of body language courses may say otherwise ).
If a company’s approach to training a graduate is to hand them a Programming book give them a desk away from the “real programmers” and tell them not to interrupt, the company will suffer in the long term. Continued formal training is required coupled with informal training, this is especially important in the early part of a graduates career.
I believe applepie are aware of this as you do mention that an interest in technology is the most important thing with respect to applying for summer jobs and you will be thought the specific skills required on the internship. So a written technical interview covering the required technical concepts is the best way to know if the candidate has the basic grasp of concepts required. Also work experience is the best way to tell if the candidate has the soft skills and ability to learn on the internship in my opinion.
How do applepie approach training with students on internships?
stephen mulcahyMarch 7, 2008
Hi David,
Thanks for dropping by and thanks for your informative comments. As a graduate of the University of Limerick, I’m glad to hear they now offer some instruction on preparing CVs. I’d love to know more about the content of this. Are you saying this is an optional course in UL? I can’t see why a few hours of training on CV preparation isn’t mandatory on all courses. I understand that 3rd level education isn’t solely about preparing people for the jobs marketplace but a few hours of such training surely wouldn’t go amiss.
If, by soft skills, you are referring to verbal and written communications skills and a good attitude, then I agree they are very important for a job and particularly important for a customer facing position such as consulting. The reality is though, if you’re apply for a technical position and you’re trying to demonstrate an enthusiasm for technology — then we expect you to be able to give us details of your exposure to technology from either your academic or personal activities.
For our 2008 Intern program (http://www.aplpi.com/jobs.html) we have received a large number of CVs comprising a wide variety of different skills profiles. All other things being equal, we probably will be inclined to give preference to candidates that can demonstrate some significant programming experience from their course-work, previous work experience or open source projects they have participated in. Between these three avenues of experience, we don’t see how any programming enthusiast could not gain reasonable exposure to some programming technologies.
As to how we approach training students on internships – we fully recognise that throwing a graduate in a corner with a programming book is unlikely to reap good results. We normally have our interns work first on a significant internal development project – either working on a system to be used internally by the company or possibly prototyping software which will be commercialised at some stage. Our interns will always be working on “real projects” – not throw-away code. We are also open to contributing some of this work back to the free software world where the work is of high enough quality to be accepted.
Interns are closely mentored by 1 or 2 mid-level staff members who have extensive real world experience in projects. We’ve found this mentoring to be of great benefit to both our staff (you’d be amazed how well you learn something from having to teach it to someone else!) and our interns who get exposed to current industry best practices and techniques (since we recognise that even the best college courses are inevitably going to lag industry in some areas at least).
If this sounds interesting, we’re still taking applications for this years internship program until the end of the month, best of luck if you decide to apply.
April 4, 2006