As mentioned in my previous post, ‘Baking a perfect CV‘, my job is highly employability focused. Having possibly overextended the cake metaphor, I recently came up with a far more concise mnemonic to summarise some key points for crafting a CV, then designed this infographic to (hopefully) effectively convey them:
Ideally, every skill and experience you include on a CV should tick all CRAFT points. If a single element rambles unnecessarily, is illegible, doesn’t make grammatical sense, is factually incorrect or is irrelevant to the role you’re applying for, it should probably be revised or removed.
And as for my final suggestion to always ask ‘so what?’, I find this a useful way to put yourself in the employer’s mindset: will it matter to them if you have advanced knowledge of HTML or a year’s office administration experience? Quite possibly. Is the fact you won the staff charity bake sale three times important? Possibly not.
(Unless, of course, the job you’re applying for is to run the website for a cupcake business… Context is everything, so CRAFT accordingly!)