12 Viruses in your CV
with
Moruf Kolawole Nasir
(Experienced HR professional)
nmkolawole@gmail.com; jarushub@gmail.com
In my previous article I Identified 10 silly mistakes job seekers make in the process of applying for jobs. This edition covers the second part of the article-Silly Mistakes in CVs, although I choose to title it “12 VIRUSES IN YOUR CV”
Errors/mistakes in CVs is also an area which has been widely written on, but most of the articles are filled with conflicting dos and don’ts thus putting job seekers in more confusion. We will attempt to identify some likely ‘dents’ in most job seekers CVs.
1. Copy & Paste Syndrome: Almost all of us are guilty of this chei? I was going through the CV of an applicant for a driver’s job few months ago, the young man can neither read nor write (because he could not fill a form given to him) yet his hobbies are reading and writing. In another case, a very smart looking fresh graduate was referred to me, I asked him questions relating to his course of study he did not do well until I addressed him as Economics graduate when he snapped in to ‘correct’ me that he studied business administration not Economics, I had no choice but to refer him to the CV he gave me. Oh! He exclaimed, “I am sorry I used my friend’s CV, I forgot to change the course of study”. Many job seekers inject their CVs with this kind of virus. Most times your person and background differ from the person whose CV you are adopting.
2. Unnecessary information: Fresh graduates are mostly guilty of this. Just to make sure their CV is ‘full’, they add viruses to it. Who says one page of A4 CV cannot do better than two pages? What business of the recruiter is your home town or your religious denomination? He will find out those if he needs them before hiring you. God help you if you are from Aluu community (you put that in your CV) and the hiring manager happened to be related to one of the victims of ‘Aluu 4’.
3. The‘Jokey’ email address: Yeah! The content of your email address matters. Trust me, nobody will be comfortable sending interview invitation to beerlover@yahoo.comor hotlips@gmail.comfor the position that requires serious minded people, and most positions do. Check if your email address qualifies for ‘jockey’ one and rid your CV of that virus.
4. Incorrect/Insufficient Personal/Contact Details: While going through some CVs for the post of ICT manager many months ago, I saw a very good CV (a candidate with the required experience and Skills for the job), I went back to the top of the CV to invite him for interview, lo and behold! his contact information is missing. Other job seekers carelessly miss a letter or sign in their email addresses. While yet another set omit a number or mix numbers up in their contact phone numbers. All these are bottle necks to invitations for interviews.
5. Design and format: I once saw a CV so nicely design that I stopped for a while to look at the aesthetic value of the CV. Guess what? The aesthetics drew my attention away from the content of the CV and as such the owner missed the opportunity of having the content of his CV assessed. Similarly, some CVs are badly formatted that one wonders if they were not actually designed to put the recruiter off. These are viruses to CVs.
6. Telling Lies in your CV: It is unfortunate that the competition in the labour market makes most job seeker stoop so low to the extent of putting false information in their CVs, unfortunately for them, experienced HR professionals are good at identifying the lies and keeping such CVs to where they belong.
7. Writing a Novel as CV: The longest CV I have seen is 17 pages for the post of operations manager, isn’t that amazing? He was actually invited for interview to come and prove that he is not wasteful. And that was the question he battled with all through. Bottom line, no matter the number of your accomplishments if you can’t sum it up in two to three pages, it becomes a minus to your CV. Some writers are even of the opinion that two pages is the maximum for experienced applicants while one page is enough for Fresh graduates.
8. Using Photo: I sometimes wonder who started the photo thing in Nigeria. In case you don’t know, printing CVs with pictures consumes more printer ink than CV without pictures. Apart from this, instead of judging the content of your CV the recruiter’s attention is shifted to the object in the CV (your picture) and that jeopardizes the chances of fair assessment of your CV. This may be the norm in Far East and Europe, but sorry it doesn’t apply to us here, and when recruiters need your picture, they SPECIFICALLY request for it. So kick that virus out of your CV.
9. Spelling Mistakes, Typos and Grammatical Errors: How will you feel if you are looking through a CV and come across “I have had sex jobs so far…” instead of six jobs so far? The Virus (Spelling mistake, Typos and grammatical errors) has been over flogged, so no point dueling much on it. The good news is, hiring managers are not grammarians and as such they are not after your spelling mistakes, typographic or grammatical errors. It becomes an issue, and a serious one at that, if the flaws are visible enough to be noticed.
10. Leaving out Information or Creating Gap: I may not blame you for not being employed, for a while after graduating from the university etc; I will only see you as a bad hire if the vacuum shows in your CV without you accounting for it productively. So if you have that in your CV then it is a Virus, kick it out or make productive account of it.
jarushub@gmail.com to order
11. Duties instead of Accomplishments: Highlighting the duties of the job you were/are doing is a waste of space. Rather than saying what your duties were/are, why not state what you were/are able to accomplish while performing those duties.
12. Irrelevant Experience: In as much as we cannot justifiably fault recruiters decision to hire applicants with work experience, Job seekers should not leverage on that to give irrelevant work experience. Two weeks of relevant work experience is more valuable to a prospective employer than two years of shelves stacking (except you are applying to work in a book shop or library). Rather than give irrelevant work experience while not identify the aspect of what you’ve got that tallies with your target job.
NB: HR Desk is an interactive desk so feel free to air your views.
Always remember “In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn”.
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Thank you Moruf for this instructive piece.
On a practical note, how would an applicant solve the issue of gap in his or her CV? It is not uncommon to see a job seeker who is idle for years, or perhaps acquiring experience that are irrelevant to his or her intended career -in the name of being occupied.
Please, how will this be solved? Avoiding lie, avoiding gap, citing relevant job experience, and no job!
This issue of gap is a serious one indeed.How could someone who studied petroleum engineering and has never had any experience in the field except in IT period close up such deep gap in career experience.
Please assist me .
[…] 12 Viruses in Your CV […]
Hi Semiu,
Sincerely speaking bro, if you have a gap in your CV it is a minus, the only solution is to think deeply and identify something productive you did during those periods, then you can ‘blow’ it up. If you lie about this, trust me some of us will know during interview, but if you ‘blow’ (exaggerate) it, there is higher chances that you will justifiably defend it.
On job experience; It will interest you to know that some of the jobs that you think have ‘no relevance’ to the job you are applying for actually have some similarities. Someone, after complaining of not getting invite for interview for a long time of applying for administrative job, I look through his CV and noticed he has worked all his life in cyber café as café attendance,(and that was very pronounced in his CV).
After speaking with him for few minutes, I discovered half of the time he spent at the cyber café, he spent it carrying out administrative functions, yet he called himself café attendance. We had to re-write his CV in-line with what he was applying for (from the work experience he had) now he has got a job. No doubt we have cases that are totally different from these, that is why we always encourage job seekers to follow a career path. But no matter how bad the situation is, make sure you identify some accomplishment you have got from the previous job and in the case of gap, you just have to account for what you use it for(not doing that will cost you many job).
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If i had a 2.2 grade in my college degree course. should i state the grade in my cv.tnx?
It’s left to you, but generally, I will say put it there.