Be Excellent To Each Other

Can any one recomend a good template... I have to update mine for work..

I have looked at the word ones and none jump out..

Cheers Kov

Name : Kov
Address: Shropshire
Job: Being Tall
Experience: Touched a boob once
Expcted Salary: 2 pints of Special Brew and a pork pie

From experience of recruiting, don't use any form of template. Two reasons:

1 - Template puts you in the same category as everyone else on first glance. not Good.

2 - Template forces you to answer questions which 'Aren't you'. Again, not good.

what is the best way of doing one.

Contact info:
Previous employment:
Qualifications:
other shit
references:

?? like that?

i thought you had to make it stand out.

Write it in blood.

i could write it in someone elses:) less painful for me

Don't put your photo on it. Keep it under 2 pages, preferably 1 page with a cover letter, without obviously cramming. Keep the main CV fairly plain and generic, tailor the cover letter to the job/company. Make sure you look at what the company does so you can do that better.

Don't fill it with lists, especially acronyms - this is really fucking hard if, like me, you have a wide variety of technologies under your belt, of which you can only get more than a quarter in by using TLAs.

Cover major accomplishments/projects, focussing on how it was only possible at all, never mind on time, budget and meeting requirements, because of you being involved. I hate this part passionately.

That's the advice I got a couple of years back. What I did was simplify my format and content, and write no cover letters. It took 10 months to get a job.

Get some fancy paper. I bought 200 pages of some watermarked parchment-like fancy paper on leaving Uni. Lovely stuff.

I wonder if you could get paper with a "give this person the job" watermark, and how well it would work.

Don't put an e-mail address on it like [email protected] as they will think you are a loser.

this is one I got off someone at uni who made it himself

it worked for him, it worked for others, it worked for me and my GF

hope it works for you if you like it

Me and my brother wrote a CV for a character we named Michael Oxlong, and all that was on it was:

"Dedication's what you need"

Roy Castle, 1932-1994

Michael didn't get any interviews.

Ah, but were you also the persons vetting the CVs and arranging the interviews? I'd reject it out of hand, as I'd know it was a false.

Yes. I have a separate email address especially for official things.

That is a good idea..

I just used my angrycake-dot-com address. It tended to get positive (ie amused) responses.

The company I used to work at once employed someone with the email address [email protected] (may not have been 69).

As for CV advice, for the job I do now my CV was the same as 100 others they got, except mine also said "Finally, although it may be of little use in an IT role, I am a skilled JCB driver."
That one line got me an interview, which, frankly, is all I needed*. So make sure to put something different in it (although not "I like little boys", or anything).

* /pulls head out of own arse

Is Curiosity's sig doubling as his CV then?

I wasn't entirely sure he'd even noticed. Let's hope he doesn't throw a comical.

I think what got me the interview here was my CV saying "I'm excited about and gearing up to developing for the Xbox 360 using the XNA thing" - one of my bosses is a nerdlinging gamer.

He hadn't, until about 5 minutes ago.

Using the process of elimination, it must've been Grim....
I like kissing skinny boys.

It was rather soon after this

When I was recruiting back in the spring, we got 250 CVs in a week - it was a graduate job with a 4 year training contract, which are in pretty short supply. I sifted them down using three filters:

1 - Covering letter doesn't mention the role or the firm at all
2 - Applying for a different job (It was a tax role, and so many covering letters were talking about being an accountant/auditor)
3 - Covering letter goes on about career ambitions which were completely incompatible with the job on offer

That got them down to about 30 worth reading.

However, I had little work so I did go through and so I then read through the rejects anyway.

Classic ones were:
- In the header of the front page of the CV, written in bold italics were 'Some people are good for menial tasks, others people can shake up your organisation - if you're looking for the former don't bother calling'. We didn't.

- One covering letter read 'I am writing to apply for the role of regional sales director...'

- A few CVs had photos on. One, (female) in the hobbies and interests section read 'The photo on Page 1 was taken at a party. I do have better photos that you can see.'

- In the covering letter one had written 'I Went to school with Mr X who is a partner at your firm'. Mr X is not a partner, and had never heard of the individual.

One CV we had still had "click here to edit this text" at the bottom of his CV.

*makes notes*

I was taught by a wise hermit never to include the words 'Curriculum Vitae' on your curriculum vitae. Or 'CV' or 'resume', or anything like that. Since it was pointed out to me I noticed that most of the good CVs I have had to review when recruiting don't have that on them.

True that. Mine only has the letter's "CV" in the file name, nowhere else.

If you are going to put 'Curriculum Vitae', don't put 'Curriculum Vital' as I saw on one the other day.

mine are normally the same.

just checked and mine doesn't say CV or anything like that.. phew! I thought it would have done for some reason...

Anyway, when I worked at GAME we had loads of CVs for Christmas jobs. One of them had a list stapled to the back of all the video games that the guy had ever completed! We were talking hundreds of games here spanning years... It was amusing for a moment, but he didn't get the job.

I also saw CVs hand written... don't do this.

And finally, one CV we had was on posh paper AND had a little Pacman theme going on around the borders. It was ace and I believe he did get the job!

There's this one...

... which?