More CV-writing tips to help your job search

In celebration of this, my 100th article in the Business Daily, let us continue with our job search series in Business Talk with the analysis of Nyavula’s quest for a job and avoiding CV-writing pitfalls.

Despite what she felt stood as a respectable resume, she failed repeatedly to land any job interview. In consoling herself, Nyavula blamed her failure on her ethnicity, her lack of contacts, her gender, and her previous schooling choices. Slowly, she started to hear of other young women from her alma mater and her home area obtaining interviews and ultimately employment.

Nyavula learned that in reality, she wrote a pitiful curriculum vitae that failed to garnish the excitement of any human resources officer filtering CVs to recommend her to come in for a first round of interviews. She fell for common hazards of CV-writing.

Continuing from last week’s four CV- writing tips, please adhere to the following additional four practices.

First, when presenting your educational background, remember to stick with one format and utilise it for the rest of the CV. Create a table in Microsoft Word by clicking insert, then table, and choose two columns and however many rows you need in order to type in your information more neatly.

Under no circumstances should you create non-standard document distances by just typing in your data and then pressing the tab button or space key to separate details. Such actions glare of incompetence and create a near guaranty of human resources passing over your CV and placing it in the “reject” pile.

Remember that formatting and a crisp looking CV speak as loud to a reader as the actual content that you type on each line. Humans are a visual species and the pleasing appearance of a document creates strong subconscious perceptions about your competence.

In formatting, if you desire the name of your educational institution on the left side of the table and the dates of your attendance on the right, then keep it that way throughout your document for other sections such as your work experience with the company on the left and date on the right or volunteer experience, among other attributes.

On the right side of the table, align your text to the left within the text box table, do not right margin justify the date or name or other details. You want every new piece of data to look uniform and move your readers’ eyes seamlessly down the sheet.

If you were to hold a ruler to your computer screen or CV paper, all the names of every school, college, employer, and volunteer organisation should line up exactly the same on the left or right, whichever you choose.

Similarly, take the ruler and ensure that all institution attendance or work dates all correspond on the left margin of the table whether or not you place the text on the left or right of the table. In short, utilise perfectly straight lines for alignment.
Your CV should look like the Business Daily with its perfect straight text alignment on each page.

Second, show your educational background by starting with your most recent educational institution or workplace first and then proceed down from there with your earliest presentable data appearing last.

In Kenya, people prefer to show their secondary schools, but as a global practice, most countries utilise the custom of dropping one’s secondary school off from the CV once an applicant earns a university degree since everyone knows that high school exists as a precursor to college. So if you apply to an international organisation, leave off your secondary school details and most certainly never include your primary school.

Third, when looking back on your student days, employers consider the time as your full-time engagement during that period of your life. So, if you earn poor marks in university, will you really put in effort into your job?

Employers can forgive poor secondary school marks because of difficult childhood experiences or inequitable learning environments and often would hire a KCSE B plain earner originating from a district school rather than an A recipient from a known leakage-infested national school. But such courtesy does not extend to university graduates.

So if you earned below a 3.0 out of a 4.0 grade point average, or below a B, or below second class honours – upper, depending on your university’s type of grading system, then do not include your score average on your CV at all.

If your university is one of the ones in Kenya that utilises the North American grade point average methodology, then indicate that you earned a 3.6 out of 4.0 thus clearly showing out of how much your average could total with full marks.

If you are above the age of 30, do not include your grade average anyway since your work experience speaks for itself after this age barrier.

Fourth, list your extracurricular activities all in one section after your work experience section for younger workers under the age of 30 or after your educational experience section for workers over 30 years old. Remember from last week that younger workers should put their education background before their work experience in their CV order and older workers should do the opposite.

You may name the section “volunteer experience”, “community work”, “awards and activities” or some other combination of such words, whichever your prefer. Only include one such section, not multiple sections for non-work activities.

When listing your activities, list only important and interesting experiences or awards. Ignore useless data such as a volunteer experience you only did one time, which makes you look inconsistent, or secondary school activities, which make you seem like you have done nothing meaningful since your high school days.

If you truly have not done anything important since high school or only sporadic volunteer or community activities, start caring about the world around you and go get such experience. In the meantime, leave out the whole section altogether off your CV if you have nothing meaningful to include instead of putting inconsequential items.

Next week Business Talk delves into specificities of capturing your work experience on your CV. Discuss life planning with other Business Daily readers on Twitter through #KenyaJobs.

Prof Scott serves as the Director of the New Economy Venture Accelerator (NEVA) at USIU’s Chandaria School of Business, www.ScottProfessor.com, and may be reached on: [email protected] or follow on Twitter: @ScottProfessor.