The job market has changed dramatically over the past few years so it’s only right that your CV reflects that. Read why hobbies, interests and contacts are so 2012
If your goal is to land a new job this year, there are two things that must change about your CV: the first is to do with the actual content, but the second is far more exciting – the medium by which you present it.
Content first
In the old days, a qualifications-based CV that highlighted your academic brilliance or a chronological CV showcasing your minimal work experience was the way to go for most graduate jobseekers. If you had neither of these two, you had to make do with a “functional CV” that no one quite knew what to do with, employers included. This is no longer the case – though education and experience are still important, the competition today is much tougher so employers have started looking to another part of the CV to distinguish one candidate from the next – your interests and activities.
In his book The Rare Find, George Anders discusses the shift towards the “upside-down” CV, where forward-thinking employers are now placing more value on the previously little-regarded element of what a potential employee does with their spare time. This is good news as a jobseeker because it means that your interests and activities can now give you the edge over other candidates, if communicated well enough on your CV. What you do outside work and education gives your potential boss a better insight into your character and possible work attributes, so take advantage of the extra helping hand and blow the dust off those hobbies and membership forms as they could help to land you your next job.
Get social
Once you have re-worked your CV to give more prominence to your interests and activities, the second shift you must make is to get social with your CV. Sending out a .doc CV by email instead of post doesn’t make you “cutting edge”; if you really want to be at the forefront of the next big shift in recruitment, you need to get yourself a professional profile on at least one of the three main social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn). LinkedIn is a great place to start as it is most similar to the old style CV, except with this, you can connect with potential employers directly, network with people in your industry, and open yourself up to the opportunity of being headhunted for a role.
Every new year brings with it the opportunity to do things differently from the year before so embrace these two CV changes this year and you may well get results you’ve never had before in your job search.
Taken from The Guardian: 17.01.12
