How To Take Your CV To The Next Level

True story: a few years ago, I was interviewing at a company and invited to join the assessment day next to other candidates amongst whom, one guy, had been invited to the interview after the recruiter saw an ad for him on Facebook. The ad was sent to a website he built entirely dedicated to the brand we were interviewing with. Talk about dedication! So this guy built a whole animated website about why he would be so great to work at this company – not even for a specific role – he designed the whole experience in the brand’s DNA, respecting the codes to perfection, and after building his animated CV/site, he invested a bit of money on Facebook where he targeted people who have indicated they work at that particular company. BINGO! He got noticed, not by the HR department straight away but by other people working for this company who shared the site and advertising piece with the HR department.

Design

The design is super important and should be tailored to the company and position you are applying for, whether that be a top executive or an intern!

Tech company = geeky looking CV.

Luxury, fashion, beauty company = polished, clean CV, modern looking. 

Finance company = stick to traditional looking CV’s, nobody working with numbers will be required or expected to show creativity.

You get the idea, how to make your CV stick to a type of look?

Step 1: picking the right fonts! One for the titles, one for the body. One tip, google “luxury fonts”, “Modern fonts” etc and find the right combo.

Step 2: colors! Not necessarily writing in colors, that could make it difficult to read but think about colors to match your theme.

Step 3: Once you have your theme, fonts & colors look for a layout. There are thousands of amazing CV layouts out there, I love to look on Pinterest for instance. See example here for modern CV design

Digital CV

You have 2 options here: build a website from scratch or buy the domain. A good domain to go for is firstnamelastname.com or you can directly use an online CV platform. There are more and more platforms like this that will let you build a great resume and host it online for you so you can just share with anyone. The great thing about those is that you don’t have to restrict yourself in the amount of in-depth information you want to share and since it is online, you leave the options for the viewer to check out more or less info.

Video CV

Please tell me you remember this video that went viral back in 2015! If not, take 3 minutes and watch Matthew Epstein give everything he has in this video to explain to Google why they should hire him. Spoiler: Google did offer him an interview after the video went to big, he didn’t get hired but he received 100 of job offers following this video.

Video CV’s can be intimidating, but some may say it is the future. Get over your fear and practice! Here are a few other videos that are really well done.

Advertise

Last tip: get your CV out there by using online advertising. If you target the right people by location, industry, job titles or companies you won’t have to spend more than 100 USD to reach your core audience and land your dream career. Give it a go!