Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first CV (curriculum vitae) to apply to be a military engineer for the Duke of Milan in the 15th Century. Though it worked as he got the job and highlights what a CV is used for, I don’t suggest you copy it. It’s very wordy.
Considering CV’s have existed since the 15th century, I wonder why we aren’t able to find a better way to apply for jobs.
Your CV is history
The main complaint that I hear from my clients is that the CV doesn’t help them change their career direction.
A CV (or resume) is a list of your work experience and career history. There is limited opportunity to show where you can go in the future, especially if it is a new direction requiring different skills.
Through a cover letter, an interview, and a personal meeting, you can tell a story and connect the dots from your work history to show a new future direction.
But to get to the interview or have your cover letter read, you have to pass the first stage with your CV.
Does it feel like Catch 22? You betcha!
Most recruiters and recruitment systems work on the principle:
Your past performance is the best predictor of future performance.
What is missing is P-O-T-E-N-T-I-A-L.
You want a job with the potential to grow, learn, develop new skills, try a new project while being paid a decent salary.
The recruiter or prospective employer wants P-E-R-F-O-R-M-A-N-C-E – a person who can prove they have done the job before.
In other words:
They want the safe bet vs. you want to take a risk and grow.
This is where you need to share a story showing you are not a risk. Your CV is not a career history but a curated CV summary of your strengths, skills, and experience (also other sections like job title and qualifications) that leads logically in a new direction. If you want more ideas and tips on how you can do this, then let’s have a call.
Robots Reading CV’s
Most Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are much less sophisticated than a robot. They use basic keyword matching – i.e. do the keywords in the job description match the keywords in your CV? So now I see CVs that are so stuffed full of keywords that you could get a full house in buzzword bingo in under half a page!
Somehow, that is still not getting them through. In an interview with a recruiter, I heard how they are so busy that it is easier to search LinkedIn than to read through the CVs from job applicants.
It sounds to me like recruiters are also giving up on CVs too?
AI will level the playing field – right?
I’ve seen the results of my client’s experiments with ChatGPT on their CV document and cover letters.
I have to say I am impressed if (and only if) they use a basis of what they have written themselves and ask for improvements.
For example, they promptly shorten their career statement, which is two paragraphs long, into three to five sentences clearly conveying their education history, work and volunteer experience, major achievement, and future direction. Then they review it and prompt ChatGPT to improve it again.
The results are disastrous if you just get ChatGPT to spit out a cover letter with minimal information. It will write a waffly, long-winded letter that is so obviously written by a machine that it is likely to get you excluded if a human ever reads it.
Using AI well soon everyone will have a CV that looks like a professional CV writer wrote it. So AI is raising the bar rather than levelling the field.
You are more than your CV – but you’re not a social media profile
I checked out a tool called Vizzy after hearing the founder on this FT podcast saying this was a better way. It allows people more freedom to express more, their favourite book, last travel adventure etc.
I wasn’t convinced because:
- Photo – After battling against the tide in Switzerland for photos to be removed as it has been shown to reduce bias, Vizzy brings it back.
- It uses a personality profile based on a shorter form of the Myers-Briggs, which has also been shown to have very low validity in the selection for jobs.
- While it is nice to show “more” than just work experience with your last travel adventure it fails to show how this creates a connection with relevant competencies you bring to a job e.g. learning to understand other cultures.
I know it is easy to criticise someone else’s noble effort to change the recruitment world, but this is not the answer.
PS If you are struggling to get the opportunity to change career direction, let’s have a call about networking, how to write a good CV, and career stories.
