You should never ever send a generic CV in for a job role. You simply have to up your game these days and stand out to be seen.
If you are smart, you will have the type of CV that is easy to customise. If you haven’t got one like that, then I strongly urge you to consider my inexpensive but highly professional CV writing kit.
Once you’ve found a job you’d like to apply for, then print off the job advert and arm yourself with a highlighter pen.
Go through the advert and highlight the essential words and phrases that you think are essential to the role. The key point here is that their most required skills/traits are always towards the top of the advert.
Once you’ve highlighted the essential elements, ask yourself whether you have those skills they require for that role.
In your key skills area of our CV, you need to mirror and match what they are asking for – but don’t just copy! For instance, if they are looking for a team player, you could put that you are a collaborator. If they are looking for someone with attention to detail, you could put that you are quality-orientated.
Next look at the job spec and see what they require and again you are going to mirror and match that in your bullet points that you list under your career experience section, for each of your roles.
For example, say the job spec says:
‘Must have experience of working with Excel spreadsheets’
If you have direct experience of that, then write that as one of your top 3 bullet points.
Top-loading and front-loading
Most recruiters initially never read the full CV. They skim, scan and scroll. Therefore your ‘good stuff’ needs to be towards the top of your bullet points and the sentences have to have the ‘wow’ factor up at the front of the sentence.
Once you’ve finished customising your CV give it one last check over. Go back to the job advert and tick off where you’ve demonstrated those skills. Hopefully, you will fit the role 100%.
By doing this, I guarantee you’ll start to get more invites to interview, as you’ll match more closely the person they are looking to recruit!