Atlantic Linux Blog

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 🙂