Recruitment agencies or employment agencies are free to use for job seekers in New Zealand. That means they often receive hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes for every corporate job advertised.
Dealing with such high numbers is not easy. Many recruiters use quick judgement, and technology (robots) to pick out the most relevant CVs. You have less than 10 seconds to impress a recruiter with your resume.
In the process, many CVs are tossed aside for failing to impress. If you do any of these mistakes, know that your CV is missing the mark. We’ll help you to fix the error.
You Don’t Have a Skills Section
What makes you suitable for a job?
Of course, it’s the skills! It’s the first thing that a recruiter zooms into when checking out your CV.
Do you have skills relevant to the job?
If you don’t give that answer to the recruiter quickly and concisely you’ve missed the mark.
The skills section is also the perfect place to include keywords to your resume.
You need to do this so that you can beat the robots that filter out ‘irrelevant CVs’. If you are wondering what are the keywords and how to insert them in the resume, consider working with a professional CV writer. Your CV is missing the mark every time you send it to a recruiter minus a skills section that’s loaded with the right keywords.
You Are Not Bragging About Your Achievements
You may have worked with a professional CV writer and got the skills section right, but there’s more that you need to do. You’ve got to show how you applied those skills to contribute positively to an organization’s objectives.
Have you highlighted a couple of your achievements?
Employers want people who can contribute to their organizations.
Connect the skills to the job and the output by briefly and boldly describing your achievements.
Write down the problem the organization was facing, your response (of course using skills and competencies the prospective employer desires) and the positive outcome. Use numbers to paint a more vivid picture of the impact of your contribution. For instance, you may indicate that as a result of your proactive action, sales figures grew by 60% or so.
If you skip bragging about your achievements, your CV will more likely be set aside because you don’t stand out.
You Have a List of Duties Not Achievements
Another common error found in many self-developed CVs is a listing of previous job duties. This not only puts you at the risk of writing an excessively long CV, but recruiters also find it boring to read. Plus, you portray yourself as lazy. Since it’s just a copy-paste from your current or previous JDs.
Don’t let your resume present a person who can easily be replaced or did not contribute to the company.
Instead, work with a professional CV writer to indicate your achievements for different roles.
You Didn’t Proof Read
Lastly, there are many errors which people make causing their CVs to miss to make a mark with recruiters. These are just but a few common errors. The most common is failing to proofread CVs before uploading it in a job board or sending it to a recruiter.
Many recruiters use grammar errors as the first criteria for throwing out resumes.
Don’t let this happen to yours. Work with a professional CV writer and share it among your peers to get vital feedback and perfect it.
