The trouble with spring cleaning your CV

It’s one of those tasks that candidates can put off for months and hate even to think about doing, but giving your CV a spring clean every once in a while is an important exercise to do throughout your career regularly, albeit a sometimes long-winded process.

What can be some of the issues that put candidates off sprucing up their CV once in a while?

What format and style is for me?

When it comes to CV formats, styles and templates, there’s so much choice out there for candidates. Is it a case of stick or twist with some candidates and their CV’s? Do they go with their tried and tested CV template they’ve used for a couple of years now, or go for something a bit more advanced and modern, but in the risk of looking totally out of touch with the job market? Right now, does your last used CV look as if it will stand up to other CV’s today in 2018?

A lot of emphasis is placed on the importance of a CV format and style as it needs to jump off the page and grab a recruiter’s attention. Thinking about this will consume enough energy and thought to put off eventually updating their CV till tomorrow.

How to fit all on two pages?

Opinion is diverse, but the golden rule for CV’s still appears to be to keep it to two pages. This raises a number of dilemmas and questions for a candidate looking to update their CV. How do they condense it down? What should it include? And what should be removed? And what is no longer relevant?

How you fit in years of experience and promote your work life in one small 2 page bitesize

has and will forever be a difficult challenge for most candidates.

A CV for that job, and that job, and that one as well…

A big problem many candidates find with CV’s is there is no CV that is one size that fits all. In today’s competitive job market, it pays to be a candidate with a diverse offering. This means the type of roles today’s candidates are applying for can be very different and require different skill-sets. If a candidate is applying for a number of roles with different requirements, there should be numerous CV’s to reflect this and this of course means the added responsibility of creating more then one CV. Updating one CV can be enough for some candidates, but updating several is another route they might not want to pursue.

The burden of doing it

The actual thought of going through the exercise of updating a CV is one that many candidates see as carrying a lot of burden with it. With CV’s going out of date as fast as three months, the mammoth task of updating a CV and the many steps and problems that can come with it is enough to put people off to the point where they end their new job hunt before they’ve even started it!

Finding it in the first place is hard enough – you’ve probably got many different CV’s lying around on your computer. Then there’s things like formatting and design problems, what to take out, file sizes, thinking creatively, reviewing and rewriting – these are things that make the whole exercise a laborious task that requires a huge amount of energy and effort.

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Is sprucing up your CV a burden for you? Recruitment is now moving into an exciting new time where candidates are opting to promote their services through live profiles that can be easily updated and are manageable anywhere you go.

Join iContract’s growing contractor community and register your free contractor profile today at www.icontract.co.uk