If you’ve found yourself staring at that word document in the depths of your hard-drive, last open in 2018, here are 5-tips to putting a CV together that is going to serve you well in your job search.

The Importance of Having a Good CV

Whilst the topic of CVs can be a bit of a bore, they are still critically important when looking for a role.

The reason is that although they are the very first step in the hiring process, they are often read in complete isolation, when there is no other information on the engineer available. The initial hiring decision of – ‘do I contact this person?’ – can be based purely on that document.

Of course, you may not even get feedback, especially if you’re applying directly to companies on Seek. You may not have a chance to explain things, and because of these reasons it is critical that you feel the document you send forward is the best representation of you.

1.    Be Specific and Detailed When Describing Your Recent Roles

Most recruiters can scan a CV and in a few seconds know whether it is likely to be a good match for a role. They do that by looking for specific things:

Is This Persons Experience Relevant to the Things I am Looking For?

The mistake a lot of engineers make in their CV is that they stop short at just mentioning specific technologies they have worked with.

To a lot of the best engineering teams however, specific languages are seen as less important, compared to how you approach an engineering problem, design a solution, and follow engineering best practice. Mentioning architectures such as microservices, event driven and demonstrating that you have a good understanding of solution design based on SOLID design principles is great, as is any experience working with message queueing.

What hiring managers are looking for especially though, is that you have good knowledge and use of Design Patterns such as CQRS – but this especially is often something that engineers omit from mentioning. There are tonnes of other examples, but the key point is to talk in sufficient detail about how you go about doing things, why you do them, and about your projects, don't just list technologies.

What is this persons average tenure? 

If you’ve had a number of short roles recruiters and hiring managers may assume that you’ve not been successful in them. So if you’ve been on contracts, you should state that. Also, don’t just mention the years, you should specify the months as well. There is a big difference between 2021-2022 and Jan 2021 and Dec 2022. You might even mention the tenure specifically – if you’ve worked somewhere for 3-years, state it. Don’t assume someone will work it out correctly - a tenure appearing shorter than it is, happens quite often.

2.    Forget the 2-Page Rule

Very rarely have I seen a CV rejected for being too long. It is very common for CVs to be rejected by a recruiter or hiring manager for not being detailed enough, however.

Your priority should be to get the required detail that I have mentioned above, into your last five years of work, or the last three roles, whichever is longest. After that summarise the previous roles if you like. Don’t feel that you need to squeeze your experience into the document to the point you’re not including the relevant things you have done.

3.    Reverse Chronological Order, etc

Make sure the information is in the order of relevance, and what is important to the reader. Without a doubt the most important thing that a hiring manager is looking for is your last role, and the five years or so before that. Many people are scrolling past your summary and anything else you’ve written as-quick-as- a-mouse-wheel-can-spin to get to it as soon as they open the document.

4.    Do Not Over Engineer It

Companies and recruitment agencies often have processes where they will need to attach a coversheet or omit some information due to internal processes or policies.

You should not make things difficult by including excessive tables, images and logos which make your document impossible and time consuming to edit. Your CV should be easy to read, and easy to navigate, less-is-more.

5.    Do Some QA

Make sure you’ve used the same font and size throughout. You'll have trouble convincing a hiring manager you’re a $200k p/a engineer if you can’t run spell check in Word.

Sometimes an agency will run spell check for you, and sometimes - if it is really bad, the agency won't send you to the client if it’s evident you’ve no attention to detail.

Spelling mistakes and carelessness in such an important document will have caused many a good engineer to miss out on an opportunity.