Wednesday 30 May 2012

Free Job Search Tool

All you need to do is follow our simple to use wizard, selecting job sector, locations where you are looking to work and CvBud does the rest for you. You will be emailed with confirmation of recruitment agencies your C.V. has been sent to from our extensive recruiter’s database which will carefully match your job requirements and location.

You will also receive full contact details of each recruitment agency receiving your submitted C.V. including address, telephone number and email address.

Put yourself ahead of the crowd and let CvBud work for you. All our recruitment agencies are carefully vetted to make sure they are genuine and CvBud has no commercial affiliation with any of the agencies; our database has the widest selection of recruitment agencies ranging from the smallest to the largest companies. Fully automate your job search today and get the job search results you are looking for from our free to use C.V. job search tool.

Friday 25 May 2012

How to Create the Perfect CV

A strong profile or career objective is the first piece of information that a recruiter will look at. Writing a concise profile is essential as it gets the reader to read on further into your CV. The American’s have an expression that encapsulates this quite well. They call this an elevator speech. Simply, tell someone concisely and accurately what you do, what you can offer them and what sort of job role you are looking for and you will have a good profile to start off prior to sending your CV.

Achievements are probably the most under-utilised element in a CV. If you brainstorm your career achievements, the CV that you end up writing will be more interesting and relevant to potential employers. When you think about achievements, focus specifically on those areas where you have delivered tangible benefits for your previous employers. If you can find benefits that are financial, these are among the strongest ones as employers are definitely interested in what you have delivered in financial terms for previous employers and therefore what you may be able to deliver for them.

A section in the CV for key achievements (five to seven bullet points), followed by the same number of bullet points in your most recent job role is a formula that we have found to be successful over some years of writing CVs for a living. Previous job roles warrant between two and five bullet points highlighting what you achieved and delivered in that job role. Other work that you completed some time ago can be summarised in an “Other Work” section. You can use this for job roles in the past that are no longer relevant or that you did for a short amount of time (for example, part time roles to supplement income during study).

Educational and professional qualifications should be separated out into two distinct sections within the CV. Educational qualifications should include the title of the qualification, the accrediting Educational Institute, the dates of study and any pertinent information that may be of additional interest. Examples include: Thesis or dissertations along with relevant course work. Professional qualifications as well as membership of professional bodies should be also included. Professional qualifications must show the name of the accrediting body, the exact name of the qualification and any dates for which the qualification is valid. For example, a first aid certificate has an expiry date and this needs to be shown or omitted of it is out of date.

Computer skills are increasingly important today. To demonstrate your abilities with a particular software program for example, demonstrate exactly how you have used the program and what you have delivered through the use of the software. For example, MS Powerpoint used to create powerful presentations that I personally delivered to communicate complex ideas, gain agreement and change sales and budgetary requirements and forecasts.

Get shortlisted for interview

Most people put their responsibilities into the CV in the work experience section. The simple truth is that employers have a pretty good idea of what your responsibilities and activities are within a role.
The difference between getting shortlisted for interview and having the CV rejected is demonstrating your worth to previous employers. The way you demonstrate your worth is to show what you achieved in that role.

In the current Economic climate, employers are thinking hard about whether or not to actually take someone on or not so you have to show that you can add value to a new employer. A great question to ask yourself is “what benefit did my previous employer gain from my employment with them?”. When you consider the value that you actually delivered, think about the benefit that you delivered for that employer.

The largest and hardest hitting benefits are financial. If you can demonstrate that your employer was better off financially as a direct result of what you did there, a future employer can’t help but be impressed and come to the inevitable conclusion that if you delivered a financial benefit for a previous employer then you can do the same for them.

Examples of achievements that you delivered in previous employments include: increases in sales and margin revenue, increases in numbers of accounts gained plus their sales value, reduction in losses of customers or churn as it is sometimes called. Other areas where you may have delivered financial benefit include the cost area, reduction in costs of goods, transport or warehouse efficiencies and the like are good examples of this.

Don’t overlook the benefits that you may have delivered in cash flow. Reduction in aged debt, increase in the time that suppliers are paid, reduction in the time that customers pay their accounts, reduction in stockholding, reduction in interest paid to the bank are among the benefits that can be included in this section. Improvements in customer service can also be quantified- for example, reduction in credit notes, increase in stock availability, number of on-time deliveries completed, and the reduction in the number of complaints make for demonstrating an exceptional track record.

Simply put, demonstrate the benefit that you delivered for previous employers and you will be well on the way to getting shortlisted for that role. Just don’t tell anyone else about it or you could well be in competition with them for that very same role.

Glenn Hughes writes for CvBud. He runs a successful Curriculum Vitae service and is a professional CV writer

Glenn Hughes is an expert for Jobs in Wales.