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Our CVʼs are our first impression

Our CVʼs are our first impression — here’s how to make the most of it.

Hiring agents spend, on average, five seconds looking at a CV before making a decision. That’s as scary to me as it is to you, but it’s also how long it takes us to make a judgement of someone when we first meet them. In other words, it’s a crucial few seconds, and it pays dividends to really focus on making a good first impression.

If we can hook a recruiter into actually reading a CV, we’re already in a strong position.
But how?

A lot of the advice online about writing CVs is subjective and contradictory:

  • Use bulletpoints!
  • Don’t use bulletpoints!
  • Add a summary—but whatever you do, don’t add a summary!

All we need is some eye of newt, and we have a set of old wives’ tales for the digital age. That said, there is some generally agreed-upon advice we can benefit from following.

Naturally, everybody wants a CV that makes them look like a professional. This means using business emails rather than a personal account and triple-checking every sentence for spelling or grammar mistakes—they almost always mean instant rejection. This is why we should always double-check any writing before uploading it anywhere. Using the active voice and avoiding a narrative progression (“first I did this… then I did that…”) are key to this style of professional writing.

Sounding professional, though, is only the start of the battle. What’s most difficult about crafting a killer CV is understanding what the recruiter wants to see and tailoring my application towards that. Often, this entails reading between the lines of the job posting to hone in on what qualities they think are truly important. A little independent research also goes a long way: sometimes candidates might have skills that neatly fit a gap in a company’s workforce. Just emphasising the right parts of their profile can pay dividends.

If all of this sounds like a lot of work, you’re right. In many respects, getting a job has never been tougher. That’s why there’s so many businesses offering CV-writing services, and also why so many of them are bad. Recruiters nowadays use AI systems to weed out formulaic, low-quality applications, meaning the CV people spend hundreds of pounds on won’t even get seen.

Where we stand out is that we employ only the writers skilled enough to beat the AI filters and grab a recruiter’s attention. With our help, it’s effortless for candidates to build up a strong CV that puts their best foot forward. We even keep in contact with the hiring department—just one less thing to worry about.

Job-hunting in 2020 is like trying to build a car from nuts and bolts. You could do it, sure, but when it comes to something so important, most people would rather just head down to the dealership. What we offer is guaranteed quality with a human touch that’s hard to find elsewhere and takes the guesswork out of sending applications. This lets candidates focus on the more important parts of getting a job—like acing the interviews we’ll be getting them!