Terrible CVs

[PymChurchBeach]

Disclaimer: I know times are hard and shitty right now and a lot of people are desperate for work so probably chucking out CVs left right and centre at anything and everything.

BUT. I have worked in HR for nearly a decade now and it has always been the same. The general standard of CVs is bloody awful. I'm recruiting for a mid level role at the moment and I have seen the following:

• people using little hearts and stars instead of bullet points
• massive glamour model style photographs taking up the whole first page of a CV
• people's dates of birth and marital statuses written up at the top. Just no!!!
• wacky, colourful borders and fonts. Comic sans. Enough said.

Also - this last one is possibly controversial but when women have had a break to look after DC, there really is no need to list all the skills gained as a SAHM - e.g. "excellent time management skills etc". You can just say you had time out to raise children. That's all you need to say. I'm not going to think any the worse of you for it.

I am desperate to implement application forms rather than have CVs and cover letters but my CEO is old fashioned and will not have it.

I encountered the awful Jobcentre advice because I was working in a Jobcentre at the time! And I agree, how is the person doing the course or talking to their work coach supposed to know what is useful and what isn't? Especially when if you don't follow their instructions they can decide to sanction you!

FWIW, we got next to no training on CV writing (that was a few years ago, so it may have improved since). 95% of our training was on how to use their hopeless IT systems. It seemed to be assumed that we'd automatically know all about the local job market, CV writing etc. I heard colleagues tell customers some ridiculous things, which upset me as it was just a waste of everyone's time.

If the jobcentre can get you an appointment to see the careers service or similar local organisation, they are usually much more on the ball IME.

Why oh why would anyone list their hobbies!?! This isn't a UCAS form. No one cares.

And the only job I ever got via the Jobcentre was the one working for the Jobcentre! I was made to apply or lose my JSA. They often know about civil service vacancies that are going, but have no time in their day to research anything else. So how they are supposed to help people I have no idea (I was on a temp contract so thankfully wasn't stuck there forever - I hated how powerless I actually was to help people and how the job became all about punishing people instead).

This thread is making me panic a bit! I'm not a 'Comic Sans/heart bullet points' or 'My hobby is dogging' candidate but I'm afraid mine is old fashioned with DOB/marital status and hobbies - again, based on what I was taught to do at school! I'm a nanny and I should imagine it's normal for a nanny's CV to be a little more informal than a city office worker's, but how do you know where the line is between coming across cold and abrupt, and including too much waffle?

I'm going to chop bits out of it now, but how much? Are there any good templates for nanny's CVs that you can recommend? I'm going to cut out my work experience that I gained during my college course, but what about my first jobs? One being working in the college nursery, and the next just 4 months in another nursery (just long enough to give me something to put on my CV before my first nanny job - nursery work was never for me!). Technically they're part of my work history but they aren't really relevant 10 years later - shall I cut them now? How much detail should I go into for each of my nanny roles? I want to come across warm and friendly but professional.

I've been a hiring manager for 20 years and have hired people from junior to board director level.

A lot of what has been said so far is useful and reading the replies it's clear that people have a block about writing CVs.

For many people there is something deeply uncomfortable about marketing yourself. But arrrghhhhhh it drives me a little bit mad when people say well, it's hard, there's too much conflicting advice online, it's not what I was taught...

Guess what. Work is hard, none of us automatically know how to do it. Often these are skills we were not taught at school or things that didn't even exist when we were at school. Most jobs involve a level of skill and competence. Most jobs have conflicting advice available online about how to do them well.

Just like CVs. So it's a way of sorting out the people who can't be bothered or do not have the skills needed to do a bit of critical online research into how to do something well.

It's 2 pages of A4 paper to make you look employable. Correct spelling, clear format, professional.

Is that really so, so hard that nearly 70% of CVs I saw for roles under management level were full of all the basic errors that PP have pointed out.

I really felt for my sales director who hired entry level sales staff. (Not that junior, with a basic of £25k). She'd get hundreds of applications, most of which were unbelievably awful - many from recent graduates.

She once showed me the pile of CVs she had selected for interview as the best of the bunch and I assumed she was joking. I refused to let her hire any of that batch, so she stopped showing me the CVs and told me to mind my own business. It was my business but I couldn't deal with the rage seeing such dross gave me.

Based on many of the excellent people she hired, she was adept at seeing past the odd spelling error and was a brilliant interviewer. But she was rare. Most hiring managers are like me and refuse to employ people who cannot, for whatever reason - I don't actually care - produce a decent CV.

I'm certainly not hiring you to represent my business and make decisions if you can't do that relatively simple task.

A task for which you have no time pressure and access to unlimited online resources. So in fact easier than most work-based tasks.

So if you ever get disheartened by the fact that jobs get 100s of applicants, rest assured that most of these go straight in the bin.

@Pickles89 'cold and abrupt' to me is 'to the point and professional'. I would find marital status very weird in someone's CV.

I don't understand listing your parents profession

My parents profession:
Mother - no profession
Father - unknown

Would be a pretty easy way to either really promote social mobility, but would probably be used to hinder it. I'm educated to MSc level, am fairly well spoken and come across middle class to many people but I imagine knowing my background would change their perception of me. Maybe in a good way, but probably not.

Shannith

Brilliant post. Totally agree.

And while I'm on my high pony...

Once you get to a certain level you will not get away with lying on your CV. The number of times I've seen someone who claimed that they were "responsible for" a project that, well I as the director, was responsible for. or where I knew the person who was actually involved in making the project happen.

Get caught doing that and it's a black mark forever and will get talked about. And you'll wonder why you didn't even get an interview.

You were responsible for implementing a very specific part of a huge project. You were not "responsible for the XXXXXX CRM project.

In many industries, people at very senior management level know each other and we talk. We can and do ask each other about candidates. We might never write a bad reference but we will and do ask about someone over the phone if we know and trust the person you previously worked for.

I recently saw a CV from someone who made some very grand claims about what he'd been responsible for in a previous job. Where he'd worked for me, a good couple of levels down.

He didn't know I was the hiring manager for the new business - he came via a headhunter.

I'm afraid I'm a horrible person and interviewed him so I could ask what his strategy had been to get investment from the board into the £15m tech investment.

To be fair, he knew he was screwed when I opened the door and shook his hand.

People in hiring aren't coming across well on this thread. I don't understand the need for the snarky responses. You want people to guess what you want, and you want to snark about them when they don't guess correctly.

I'm not in hiring, but several people who are have mentioned they get dozens or hundreds of applications for a job. Which means that for a hiring manager, it's really not in their interest if everyone has great CVs! Being able to spend 5 seconds glancing at each and throw 95% straight in the trash is a good thing from their point of view.

(Or at a fair few companies, a computer program searches for keywords and discards the CVs without them, before a human ever looks at it.)

I worked in Australia for a while and 15 page CVs were normal. In the US the advice is to keep it to a 2 page document

In some countries including the USA and Australia, a "CV" is specifically a very comprehensive and typically long history of your employment, while a "résumé" is a two page summary. But in the UK the two page summary is called a "CV". Divided by a common language and all that.

I dont think responses have been snarky. People are however pointing out that you need to put some effort in. And that if you dont, you probably dont deserve the job anyway. The odd mistake is very different to someone who clearly hasn't bothered to even try.

Basic literacy etc is pretty much essential in any job. Producing a cv that demonstrates this is not insurmountable. Sticking in hobbies or marital status is irrelevant but most people on here have acknowledged that they will clock it but not necessarily bin it as a result.

But it shouldn't take specialist expertise to understand that if you're applying for a junior accountant role, your ability to bake cakes is largely irrelevant.

The ability to bake cakes is never irrelevant. The sort of people who love baking as a hobby have a tendency to bring the results of their hobby into the office.

@safariboot

Missing the point there.

Some posters are complaining that there is misleading advice online. My point is to ensure what they are reading is written by someone with experience in the country in which they are applying for a job. Hiring norms are different in different countries.

I’ve worked in HR, specifically Talent attraction in three different countries and spent ten years working for global companies, where I had meetings with my counterparts in the US and Asia regularly.

Brilliant advice from Shannith.

for a hiring manager, it's really not in their interest if everyone has great CVs! Being able to spend 5 seconds glancing at each and throw 95% straight in the trash is a good thing from their point of view

I wouldn't go that far; the idea is to have a decent pool to choose from, rather than being left with a few who are the "least awful" (or those who, having been told a good science degree is essential, insist that an NVQ in hairdressing counts)

Hobbies- making home brew and chillin out!!!

It was a high security job and we needed to photocopy ID's. Our came a little bag off weed from his passport!!!

@fandajji

I don't understand listing your parents profession

My parents profession:
Mother - no profession
Father - unknown

Would be a pretty easy way to either really promote social mobility, but would probably be used to hinder it. I'm educated to MSc level, am fairly well spoken and come across middle class to many people but I imagine knowing my background would change their perception of me. Maybe in a good way, but probably not.

As one who has an identical background to you plus as someone who has to vet CVs - I mean this with the best will - nobody cares.

Don’t put it on your CV to take up valuable page space when something else could take that space!

I have a II:2 in maths in 1991, followed by 7 years of temporary work (packing factory, cleaning, basic office tasks, typing lecture notes) with an NVQ3 (IT) gained during the time I was officially unemployed.

Then I left the workplace to look after my children and apart from about a year covering maternity leaves doing data entry and such in the project my husband was leading have not done paid work since.

I've been a PCC secretary and a school governor for over a decade and can waffle about that for a paragraph or two.

All my employers have restructured and moved and almost certainly wouldn't remember me anyway.

Any advice?

A nanny’s CV should certainly list any hobbies that have even the slightest chance of being relevant.

I quite like a couple of lines of interesting hobbies at the end of a junior level cv even for the dullest office job, but even the PPs who’ve been completely dismissive of hobbies in general must admit that anything creative, sporty, cultural or culinary should definitely be included on a nannying cv to give it an edge. For example I was delighted to hire a nanny who had the artistic skills I totally lack myself.

Why oh why would anyone list their hobbies!?! This isn't a UCAS form. No one cares

Well, you are wrong. People do care.
If you get too many candidates who all meet the job requirements, you have to start looking beyond that.
Now, of course - as was said on a similar thread to this a year or two back, what you don't know, is how the person doing the filtering will respond to what your unusual hobby ~whether they will think of it as an added string or a distraction. But you are wrong to claim nobody cares. Some people's hobbies include some excellent, transferable skills.

@merryhouse , I don't think anyone can advise you without knowing what sort of job(s) you are applying for.

Parents' profession is now asked for by the Civil Service, I think, as part of the diversity monitoring (so I assume the part that wouldn't get passed on!) That would be through a form though. You wouldn't put it on a CV.

merryhouse, with so long out of the workforce I think you will have to position yourself as essentially entry level, but with maturity and commitment etc. As PP said it depends what type of jobs you are planning on going for. If it's office work, I would strongly recommend taking some online courses in current office tech like Microsoft Teams and modern Office, plus maybe some courses in whatever area you are targeting. If you can afford it, a genuine, good career coach to help you build a CV might be worth it. Good ones are not always easy to find. Alison Green of askamanager.org does CV coaching and is brilliant - she's US-based but has understanding of UK conventions (the only real difference is that US call it a resume and favour one page whereas in UK 2 pages are more acceptable). Or she might be able to recommend a UK coach.

Why oh why would anyone list their hobbies!?! This isn't a UCAS form. No one cares

^Well, you are wrong. People do care.
If you get too many candidates who all meet the job requirements, you have to start looking beyond that.^

As a hiring manager, you screen against the skills and experience required in the person spec. You do not call people to interview because their hobbies sound interesting.

After entry level jobs, only include outside interests that are relevant to the post.

On a nanny's CV I would expect to see "interests" rather than "hobbies" as to me a hobby is something you do in your own time, but an interest is something that you might bring into caring for the child(ren), especially if it's slightly educational or might excite my child.

For entry-level and return to work CV's, I'm not really interested in hobbies unless you've done something. For example, "play table-tennis" is a hobby that I don't need to know; but "coach under-14 table-tennis" might be relevant as it shows experience of understanding rules, teaching, and coaching.