Career: Role and Mechanism of CV

The role of a CV or a Resume can never be small or ineffective. The key reason why a CV or a resume plays a vital role in your career is quite simple and logical, the CV is your personal brand letter, your sales brochure, and your advertising paper.

Although there are many factors which affects how a person’s professional career progresses, such as having a good degree from a strong and reputed university, plus having some big names under your belt as work experience, nevertheless when you want to apply for a new position you have to send out your CV, a CV is not only a document which markets you or is a statement of your experience and educational background, your CV is you in paper form.

You have to ensure that you put your heart and soul in that document, that it begins to actually emit the aura which your physical presence does. Now this seems an ideal and at the same time challenging task, but coming from thousands of HR experts and hiring managers, who claim that there are other factors as well apart from a well written resume, which affects their hiring decisions, an expert with over a decade in Recruitment and HR industry says "when I open a CV, there is an strong impact on my mind within the first second, I haven't even started reading a resume, but factors such as file type, fonts and design, clarity, neatness, grammar, conciseness and relevancy of content, all play a very important role in either trashing the resume or sending it to the shortlisted folder".

The best way to ensure that you get all things right in your resume or CV is to first write all your relevant academics and work experiences in order and then ensure that you get all the relevant personal information correct, heavy emphasis here is on the "relevant". Once that is done make sure you get at least 4 -5 people to rate your CV building effort, then revise and redraft, finally given the current era of social media you can ask some HR professional to score your CV as well.

The dilemma here is this that not everyone knows how to write a professional resume/CV as one HR head of a big IT company states "My job is to hire people day in and day out, hundreds of CV's cross my eyes every day, yet one day I showed my CV to my mentor and he pointed out that it was very bad". Now how did this happen? Actually a CV is not something which is limited to HR people or those people who have good writing skills. To answer our question we spoke with a very senior management person from Karachi and here is what he had to say "Anyone can make a statement of what you have done so far in life in terms of career and education, but it takes a whole lot more for someone to make an ideal and to a great extent a fool proof resume or CV for you, you have to ensure that the CV is professional in all regards".

The main thing which we concluded from the HR experts and the management gurus is quite simple, we have listed them in bullet forms for your ease below:

• Not everyone knows how to write a resume or CV
• Before writing a CV you have to ask yourself a lot of questions in terms of what you want to achieve from this document.
• A CV is a blend of Content, design, fonts, layout, recruiters psychology targeting, marketing in short it should sell you to the employer, or at least secure an appointment.
• Neatness and clarity, legibility and fairness all are major contributors.
• Comprehensive yet conciseness
• A CV varies from position to position and industry to industry

Now from above, it seems that a person has to become a CV or resume writing expert before embarking on a task for drafting a CV, however as one professional suggests " the best and effective method is to engage professional CV writing specialist for this job, the rationale is quite simple, professional CV writers make CVs and resumes all the time and have firsthand knowledge and skills about how to write a CV, they know what type of formats to choose for which career level and what type of fonts and content is essential for which roles, hence giving you a winning combination”.

In conclusion we can say that CV is a complex and intricate document which is mercilessly being written by everyone themselves, the document is holy and should be entrusted with professional CV makers, CV does not imply a document with your details pasted on a document, it should be more strategic and should be landing you interview calls. Fortunately there are many professional CV writing companies whom you can contact at your behest.

Good Luck!