Tips to enhance your CV, and improve its uniqueness

Regardless of the debate around the number of people currently pursuing financial services positions, two things are certain: there are thousands of financial services CVs available on CV databases, and any recruiter advertising a job has to trawl through many hundreds of them every single day.
This being so, how can you ensure that your CV isn’t consigned to a life of oblivion?

1) Use key words
If you send your CV to a recruiter, it will probably end up on a CV database. Alternatively, you can always load your CV onto a CV database directly.

Once your CV is on the database, it will be extracted by recruiters who have searched for key words. If your CV does not contain the correct key words, it will therefore not be found. Conversely, the key words your CV contains, the greater the chance that it will NOT languish in obscurity.

Needless to say, you should only mention key words if they actually apply to your achievements and experiences. One senior in-house recruiter says candidates have a tendency to insert key words, even when they’re not relevant.

“Candidates might write, ‘I worked with a project manager,’ so that they ensure the words ‘project manager’ are included in their CV and that it will come up in database searches for project management roles,” he reflects. If you do this, you will get a bad name.

2) Cut the guff

Do not bury your achievements in a mountain of waffle. If you do, it is unlikely that your CV will be unearthed on a database search, ever. Keep to the point; concise and RELEVANT information will be vauled by the recruiter. CVs need to be short. The recruiters often read 200+ CVs each day. “As a rule of thumb, the more verbose the covering letter, the longer the personal statement, and the more long winded a CV, the less suitable the candidate,” says James Heath at Greenwich Partners.


3) Mirror the job specification

If you’re sending in your CV in application for a particular job, then guess what? It will help to adapt it to the job in question. In particular, it will help to read the job specification in detail, to think about what’s being asked, and to adapt your CV to try and reflect the fact that you’ve got the experience requested (if you haven’t, it’s not worth applying). Look at the words being used to describe the skills required in the advertisement. Use these in your CV.


4) Keep updating it

When recruiters are searching job boards for CVs, they are usually given the option of filtering CVs based on how recently those CVs were updated/uploaded. This being the case, it’s worth uploading your CV every day every month to make sure you’re not at the bottom of the pile.

Alternatively, if you’ve sent your CV to a recruiter, it might be sufficient just to keep calling them up. “We are able to sort CVs on our database according to how recently we’ve spoken to candidates,” says one recruiter. “Every call a candidate makes to us is registered, and the more recent the activity, the higher the CV will appear on a search that's filtered by date.”