CV Writing Blog

5 Things You Absolutely Must Include on Your CV

Your CV is an opportunity to showcase your skills, talents and expertise to a potential employer, so it’s vital you get it right.

It will usually be the first point of contact a potential employer has with you, and they’ll probably only spend seconds looking at it.

To stand a chance of scoring an interview, you need to reel them in and make them want to see more. You need to highlight the most important information in a clear and succinct way.

Whilst the rules of CV writing aren’t set in stone, there are certain things every CV should include.

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10 Ways to Impress an Interviewer: Our Guide

So you’ve managed to bag yourself an interview for your dream job. You’ve got all the right skills and experience. That’s enough, right?

Not necessarily. A huge amount depends on the impression you make in your interview.

A job interview is an opportunity to sell yourself to potential employers. It’s a chance to let your personality shine through and prove you’re the best person for the job.

Give yourself a head start with these ten ways to impress an interviewer.

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How to Present a CV: the Essentials

Working out how to present a CV is something worth devoting a good amount of time to, to give you the best chance of securing an interview.

Most job applicants will spend the vast majority of their time focusing on the content and selling their skills in the most convincing and interesting way possible – and rightly so.

After all, employers will be looking for the candidate they feel will be the best fit for the role, but poor CV presentation is one of the quickest ways to ensure that your application ends up in the bin.

We’re not saying though that you should be trying to come up with the most original presentation style anyone’s ever seen – definitely not.

In fact that could be risky and may undermine the whole CV, acting as another way to fast-track the whole application towards the scrapheap.

We’re saying that it’s vital to get the basics right, strike the right tone for the employer and make the CV feel professional by eradicating any errors.

So without further ado, here’s how to present a CV – and how not to.

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Writing a Professional CV

There’s no such thing as a standard CV or the perfect example of how a CV should be or look, and yet the internet is overflowing with websites offering something along the lines of ‘a standard example of a good CV’. This will not help you at all, or at the very least, help will be limited. Whoever’s designed what they believe to be ‘a standard example of a good CV’ and pasted it up online may have good intentions, but the fact remains that they have never even met you.

A good CV is only ever a good CV unless it works for you and fulfils its purpose of successfully marketing and showcasing your skills, employment experience, expertise and personal qualities. CVs must never be generic, they should only ever be customised and unique to you.

The writing of a good CV is often harder than most people think, partly because many of us find it hard to sell and market ourselves, or at least to put it into words. But you need to turn in a professional-looking CV in order to have any hopes of gaining an interview. In sidestepping this dilemma, writing a professional CV can easily be left to the experts.

Writing a professional CV can be left to Purple CV.