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CVs - Third or First Person


kurzweil_dude

  

31 members have voted

  1. 1. Are CVs best written in:

    • Third Person
      3
    • First Person
      15
    • None
      13


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Your CV is a list of skills and qualifications - what little prose there is in it should be in the third person but frankly there's rarely going to be more than a sentence of text at a time surely? Employers don't "read" cv's, they skim through them to find out what your core skills are and where you've worked before; personality and explanations should be in your covering letter.
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No person.

 

The CV should purely be a list of facts...contact info, qualifications, experience and references in bullet point/table form.

 

Then send this with a cover letter...in the first person...introducing yourself and putting in all the "I'm a strongly motivated, team-working self starter with a strong work ethic" guff that will be ignored anyway.

 

(Speaking as one who received literally thousands of CVs in his working life.)

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Yeah. When I used to receive CVs, I could always tell the ones from people who had been coached. They were too long, too wordy and full of stuff that was opinion or self-promotion rather than fact.

 

Obviously I can't speak for every employer but I agree totally with ImagineerTom. A CV gets about 30 seconds of skimming...if the applicant is lucky. The employer is interested in the bare facts...qualifications and experience. The easier you can make it to find this, the better. I'll go out on a limb here and say that your CV should be only 2 pages long--perhaps with references spanning onto a third page. Unsupported "sales speak" about how you work hard and love your mother is useless and potentially annoying. The job of the CV is to get you an interview, not get you the job. You can editorialise a bit more in your cover letter (keep this to a short page by the way) but, again, who cares if YOU think you're a self starter with people skills.

 

(Putting it into perspective, at the end of a 35 year career in broadcasting which ended up at a board level position as Director of Operations and Engineering, my CV still stuck to the 2 page rule. However, they were two pages of LOTS of experience and not one bit of self promotion.)

 

I'm sure there are various "specialists" who will teach you how to sell yourself and so on (and others who will charge you to write a CV) but I bet very few have ever been on the receiving end of hundreds of applications for a few jobs.

 

Stick to the facts and cut out the flannel.

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None. CVs should be purely factual, and as brief and concise as possible. Cover letters and application forms are for the 'padding' and self-promotional stuff.

 

Anyone who writes about themselves in the third person in the context of a job application or similar should be shot - pretentious in the extreme. It's only acceptable if you're writing, say, a programme biog.

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Yep, just the facts ma'am.

If it goes over two pages cut it down ruthlessly.

 

To be honest, it is far easier for an overlong CV or covering letter to loose you an interview then it is for it to get you one, by which I mean that in the first instance you take that pile of 100+ CVs and try to filter out the blatantly unsuitable, this filter is all kinds of crude, and is at the 10 seconds or less per CV level:

 

Pink paper with ponies on it? (Yes, Really, I received one like that).

Wrong company name?

Claimed experience in a post that would have made you my deputy on a gig I worked on, and I don't remember you?

Claimed graduation with PHD at what backtracking to date of birth would have made candidate ~9 years old....?

No relevant experience at all (I think the dole office make them do it)?

Txt Spk?

Gushing word salad like some sort of social media marketing type?

"Hobbies: Smoking da Leaf"?

Seen them all, round filed them all.

 

Also the more you write, the greater the opportunities for the dreaded SPAG CV cockup to occur.

 

Regards, Dan.

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Yes the dole office make you write 10 applications a day and they coach you to write self aggrandising guff. Your CV has to get past THAT. Short, easy to read, easy to get the facts from -and make sure you have checked every fact for detail accuracy. Make sure that your CV answers every essential mentioned in the advert, and some of the possibles too.
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Ten a DAY??!!

 

I couldn't turn out ten a week last time I was looking, even assuming I could find that number of really suitable gigs to apply for.

 

Bear in mind that after hearing about the job you need to do the research on the company, then tweak the CV to make sure you hit as many relevant points as you honestly can, sounds like a days work per application to me if you do it right.

 

No wonder companies prefer to use recruitment pimps (Useless as they generally are) rather then the dole office when advertising vacancies......

 

Still it explains much.

 

Regards, Dan.

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A college near us had obviously done the "How to write a CV and submit it to local companies" lecture, so we got a handful of incredibly bad CVs, all based on an identical template, with truly awful covering letters. It at least gave us a few minutes amusement in the office before we binned them all. The best bit was that they all claimed to have their own companies, and have worked for each others companies as freelancers.
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Very aware of the 2 page rule.

 

In termes of third/first person writing, I was more referring more to the accounting of duties, without making sentences shorthand/noteform, rather than paragraphs of prose.

 

eg: A sentence like: "It is my duty to look after the requirements of the visiting artists and to ensure each show runs as smoothly as possible whilst using equipment provided in house."

 

Opinion would seem to state the preferred wording would be something along the lines of...

 

VENUE:

- Look after the requirements of the visiting artists

- Use equipment provided in house

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I agree with everyone else about sticking to 2 pages of facts for your CV.

 

Put what your job title was and what duties you performed.

VENUE:

- Look after the requirements of the visiting artists

- Use equipment provided in house

This could be 'made actor a cup of tea using the kettle in the Green Room' or it could be 'Technical Manager responsible for relights'.

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