Working on the best sales brochure, now: the Resume is more important than you think.

Day in and day out one of the activities that headhunters are involved in is the CV screening. We receive hundreds of emails everyday, as many candidates desperately send profiles from everywhere while replying to job adverts in internet.

Sometimes they contact us right in the middle of the night and from the most remote geographies of the planet: it is though trying to explain your wife that it’s just another candidate sending his profile at 3 in the morning, and that you are not hiding any side woman on your phone (trust me, still happens all the times).

Many candidates nowadays don’t understand the importance of crafting a punchy resume, or have no idea what it takes to strike the interest of the screener and get the interview for their dream job.
As I am sure that many of you only update it once in a while and that have no idea how to be effective, let me put some notes together that can help you doing it. 

A CV is nothing more than a sales brochure that highlights your hard tangible skills such as academic background, summary of your qualifications and career highlights.  It has to be effective, efficient and able to beat all the recruiters and CV screeners to get you in front of the doors of your next employer.

And also needs to answer to one important question: why should I hire you? 

Do you know how long a headhunter spends looking at your resume? 5, 6  or 10 minutes?

While you are questioning whether the picture you put on it looks good or not, let me give you the answer: only 6 seconds, according to statistics. (and please, remove that picture as we are not recruiting for a modeling agency here).

There are some specific areas where we focus our attention while fast-screening: your name and personal info, current employer, previous employers, duration of the previous positions (here in Japan the job hoppers are not well seen) and your educational background.

Let’s get started and share some hints about do’s and dont’s on how to craft your new CV.

•  It must be visually appealing: unless you are applying for a role as visual merchandiser, designer or anything that is art-related, you do not need to use graphic fireworks or flashy colors in your resume, but rather make sure that there is a good use of space and whites and use a neat font that can be easily read (I always use Arial Narrow, as personally hate Times New Romans given that most of people use it as default, however all the classic fonts are fine), and well formatted (use justification when possible, dose the use of lists, bullet points and bold / italic to highlight keywords).
• needs to have effective contact details: in other words neutral email address which is easy to understand and not weird, as trust me, if you have a funny email your CV would be a laughing stock and first impression on you would be undoubtedly negative.
  In 8 years of recruitment I have seen the worst email addresses in life: people using nicknames, or any other foolish details that make them look stupid.
  I always recommend my candidate to use email such as name.familyname@emailprovider.com and not to use any weird details: please do yourself a favor and don’t use the email that your college email.
  Add only the personal cellphone number: sometimes I see candidates adding their work email and direct landlines. Please stop doing it, as you really don’t want us to contact you at work.
  
  
• needs to have a summary of qualifications that explains your profile in a nutshell: 4 or 5 bullet points should be enough. Do the exercise of breaking down your profile into short focus point that describe your strengths, your technical background as well as characteristics that well match with the role you are applying for.
• career has to be described in reverse chronological order from the most recent position to your first one, making sure that the top part of the resume the current role is well explained. That’s the area that we look at the most in your CV, the first part even before looking at your personal info or anything else.
  Write down your role, main responsibilities, product / projects you are dealing with, and if possible awards and achievements. Make sure to do the same for all the others.
• Numbers, numbers, numbers! A solid CV should include numbers, and possibly some percentages to give better understanding and clarity around your ability and success during your career, using quantitative measurements and outstanding notable accomplishment. Especially if you are working in front office, highlighting size of deals you have been successfully covered, or percentages of market share gained against a client, will definitely put some starts in your resume.
•  make sure that you don’t under-sell and oversell yourself in your CV So many times I review resumes where the “brand promise” of the candidate is not well explained, therefore I need a face to face meeting to really understand the potential beyond the paper.
  Since none of you are a professional CV writers, it is important to make sure to use a consistent tone of communication as it might be the case that you undersell yourself , not sounding convincing or lacking of self-esteem.
  But most importantly make sure that you don’t lie: overselling capabilities, skills or achievements with lies in the resume is not a smart thing to do, firstly because we all know each other in this market but also because you might get disqualified during the hiring process (a terrible no face value in the market), or even worse fired after a company hires you.
• be meaningful while explaining your career highlights: explain quantitative and qualitative achievements making sure to describe relevant tasks that you have covered, that you have led teams into projects, how you overachieved your sales target and all these information that needs to sound like an exciting movie trailer, giving the flavor on how you could contribute and be an asset if you were to be hired by my client.
• Don’t add too much information such as marital status, health condition, hobbies and passions or anything that is not strictly related to the job search, as it could be a reason for “below the line” discrimination (you don’t imagine how many things can be read through the lines and how can give an impact to the first impression of the candidate during the CV screening).
  Also, sentences such as “Reference Available Upon Request” are not needed.
  In today’s recruitment has become more and more irrelevant, given that all of us are on social media and we are interconnected to each other in some way. Reference will be requested if any background check is needed, hence do not mention any name of potential referee in your CV essentially because you don’t know what is the impression that the headhunter might have on him/her , or even more important, if there is any correlation with your next employer or hiring manager. You can add some social media profiles such as Linkedin but not Facebook or any other page that is too personal.
• Please no photos unless you are applying for a modeling job, I really believe it is not requested to have a personal photo in your resume. If you have been debating on what picture to add to your CV, the answer is none of those selfies you have just took with your camera!
• Educational info: some people debate whether to add or not the graduation date, however I do not see any problem with that. Given that I am working in Japan, I can add some precious info regarding educational info to be added in your CV.
  If you are coming from a top notch University and you belonged to a specific club or extra-curricular course, and said club has relevance or is famous in the Uni, I would suggest you to add such detail.I have been seeing hiring manager choosing candidates based on University and Club affiliation, as here in Japan there is a very complicated ramification within society that will tell you in another story.