News Article

Feature: The Guardian
Publish date: November 2006

Contact Accendo CV

Joseph has a straightforward style in his CV which is appealing, but creates distraction within the body of his CV.

The professional press in HR tell us endlessly that there is a dearth of Industrial and Employee Relations skills in the market, which is an opportunity for new graduates coming into the profession. IR/ER is the hard end of Human Resource Management and employers look for practical traits contained within graduate CVs. Presenting information about his dissertation early in his CV and without giving any quantification of the effectiveness of using alternative & holistic medicine to improve attendance may not be the best item, albeit one that can raise the reader’s curiosity. However not to fulfil that curiosity is unwise.

Compare this with Joe’s fluent and impressive description of his work experience, where his enthusiasm for sport shines through, results in a CV with a split personality.

These are easy things to improve, by taking the work experience section and repositioning it after Joe’s Personal Description, and moving the academic achievements to page 2. Other corrections are to change the CV from first to third person, and bring that style and enthusiasm which sprang out of the work experience into the other sections. And by all means use the holistic medicine as an exploration of absenteeism, and show a conclusion. Other items, the pitch size of the lettering at 10 point is low, the use of a hotmail account isn’t wise (some employers silently block hotmail and yahoo accounts for the obvious reasons) – best is his own ISP and better is Google mail. Joe should label his CV Joseph Strudwick Sept 08 (rather than Curriculum vitae, jstrudwicj.1.1), to help the recruiter file it easily.

Finally Joseph has produced a simple and elegant CV, however he has left rather too much ‘white space’ which gives an initial impression of paucity of information. An expansion of his areas of professional interest within HR, more on his work experience and changing the font size form 10 point (too small) to 11 will improve the appearance.