CV help! Does anyone have any recommendations?

[Olive158]

I have recently been made redundant and I need to start applying for jobs however my CV is so long. I have been looking at paying someone to redo it for me but there are so many options I don't know which one to use. I contacted one person and they used ChatGPT to respond to me (They accidently pasted their request). Has anyone used this service, was it worth it and any recommendations?!?

Well definitely don't use the chat got person! You could always run it through yourself.

Why is your CV so long? Are you tailoring it for each job application?

No, I didn't. I told them I can use ChatGPT myself.

No I haven't been tailoring it as I really don't feel confident cutting anything out. I have had a lot of jobs in 20 years.

How many pages is it? 2 is usually the max and some companies only want the last 10yrs of experience, some only the last 5!!! Which sector OP?

I was made redundant a few years ago. I had to keep saying to myself 'The role became redundant'. When being interview, never say the 'I was made redundant', its always 'THE ROLE was made redundant.'

It is just because my roles are all a bit different. I want a professional to have a look and let me know but some of the websites look dodgy.

What industry are you in? My other half and I are both in Finance and we used a guy called Bill Brace from LinkedIn he was brilliant. I'm 55 and I can't get below 2 pages but that should be ok. Anything over ten years ago is irrelevant really. I've had tons of jobs too but most can be bundled up as office work, business development, account management, managerial etc and had the same skills.

There’s lots to say on this topic but as others have said concentrate on your experience for the last ten years (or whichever experience you have which is most relevant for what you are applying for.) Aim for 4-5 examples of your key achievements in bullets rather than a big list of job duties. For your more historical roles then the job title, dates, company and a brief sentence to explain the role is enough. I have lots of videos on creating a CV, feel free to message me if you’d like access to them.

Mines are no more than 3 pages and I've had two interview invitations recently (didn't get them but not because of the CV). You can do columns if that helps you to put everything in, or try one of the infographic templates on the visual CV website? You can also try the Canva templates.

It's hard, I was made redundant in February and had to restart my CV as I got my last job straight out of my PhD so my previous CV was education focussed.

I have a full CV giving full details of each role then use this to create 3 variants of my CV depending on the role highlighting different aspects of my background. A lot of my early career was focused on a technique which I used in my most recent job too so I have one CV highlighting my experience in this technique. Realistic these jobs aren't practical for my life now and in my last role it's been more focused on the application of the information this technique gives and offers opportunities to step sideways into roles connected to this application and bringing together other techniques too. I have another CV highlighting these skills and it's where my job search is mostly focused. Then I have a third CV for more generic data handling type jobs and pick out different things from the difference positions I've had.

For each job role I then do buzz word bingo with the job advert and then ask AI to compare my CV and covering letters to see how well they compare just to check that I've not missed anything. I add anything I've missed and ignore the irrelevant bits.