Yahoo Finance How to write the perfect CV – first, refuse to play this stupid game
For some strange reason, I find myself having to write a CV at the same time as my teenage daughter. I find this demand as ridiculous and unwieldy as she does. She could just send a Snapchat or something, whereas I wonder if anyone actually needs to know the course of my life, which is the rough translation of curriculum vitae. In this world of portfolio careers and zero-hour contracts, what does a CV really achieve? At her age, she has to exaggerate her experience: at mine, I have to gloss over certain years. Does anyone need to know about my short-lived career selling encyclopaedias in Louisiana? I think not. My time as a trainee audiology technician is as relevant as the O-levels I got in another era.
The shorter the better anyway, apparently, as the average boss looks at a CV for three minutes. This seems unnecessarily long to me. What with the personal statements everyone is now required to write, applying for jobs is a job in itself. If you are old, if your name doesn’t sound “English”, if you have had time out having kids, all these things make you less appealing. There is instead a dreadful homogenised jumble of jargon; so many CVs read like the worst Apprentice applicants on glue.
Young men and women are selling themselves as “disrupters” and Steve Jobs mark II, when they only do what they are told. If you don’t come from the right background (eg a middle-class one) you are unlikely to realise what these things should even look like. The same with Ucas forms. So, you don’t play the cello, do am-dram and spend every waking moment doing voluntary work? How well-rounded are you? Just don’t put as your interests as “cooking dogs and interesting people”, as one poor sap did. Punctuation matters. And spelling, all that kind of thing, although I am always stumped at the hobbies bit as, to me, all hobbies are a sign of the capacity to be a serial killer.
Still, I lived at time when many of us wanted to be considered unemployable, so we could get the dole and do our own thing. We would be sent to interviews even when we had written “satanism and sulphate” for our interests. My mate, who really did not want a job, was doing worryingly well in an interview, so when they got to the “What makes you want to be part of this team?” question, he had to think fast. “Because the voices told me to.” Phew! He was able to carry on being unemployed until he became a pop star. Nowadays, the lines between boasting, appalling management-speak and honesty are fine ones. Dealing weed may indeed teach you something about enterprise, but putting “marijuana dealer and nefarious dude” is not good. Nor is writing skills as skillz; nor, as I have had to explain, is “YouTube” a qualification. No one cares about everything you ever did.
Some employers are now asking potential employees to make videos of themselves. What fresh hell is this? The more we are forced to commodify ourselves for the most basic jobs, when actually so much will become automated, the more this cycle of illusion continues. A robot CV is the goal, surely?
You may be excellent at your job, but very bad at selling yourself. I read that I must use “action” words and no emojis. I must not resort to cliches. Good listener, team player, etc. There is no point, I suppose, in saying, “please, let’s not play this stupid game”.
A CV is as trustworthy as a dating profile. Turning oneself into an acceptable product may be the course of some lives. But it’s not mine.
