eCV helpful hints
Helpful hints to ensure your CV gets seen by prospective employers when you apply online.
The e-cv or e-resume, short for electronic CV or Resume, is a vital tool for today's job-seeker.
But what exactly is an electronic cv or resume? Whilst opinions vary about what is or is not an electronic cv, it's a broadly used term that covers several types of cv's. What ties these cv types together is mode of delivery. Rather than traditional modes of cv delivery - snail-mail, faxing, and hand-delivery - e-cv's are delivered electronically -- via e-mail, submitted to Internet job boards, or residing on their own Web page. Then there are sort of middle-tech cousins of e-cv's, scannable cv's - used less and less frequently these days - that are in print format but are ready to become electronic cv's through optical scanning.
- 1. You absolutely MUST have one.
- 2. Your e-cv must be loaded with keywords.
- 3. Your e-cv must be achievements-driven .
- 4. An e-cv is not too difficult to create.
- 5. Text-based e-cv's are pretty ugly, but you can dress them up a bit.
- 6. E-Cv's are highly versatile.
- 7. You must tailor the use of your e-cv to each employer's or job board's instructions.
- 8. Take advantage of job-board features to protect yourself and get the most out of posting your e-cv on the boards.
- 9. A few finishing touches can increase your e-cv's effectiveness.
- 10. Use your common sense
5. Text-based e-cv's are pretty ugly, but you can dress them up a bit.
Job-seekers and cv writers have strived for years to develop ways to make cv's visually appealing and graphically interesting - through font choices, bold and italic type, rule lines, bullets, centring, indents, and more - only to have all that formatting thrown out the window in the e-cv world. Text-based e-cv's are the antitheses of the gorgeous documents that job-seekers hand to employers at interviews and career fairs. The fact is that most e-cv's aren't intended to be visually attractive because their main function is not to be seen but to be searched in keyword-searchable databases.Still, they may be seen at some point. Employers may see the cv you've posted on an online job board. Their primary interest is whether the content of your cv (indicated largely by keywords) shows you to be qualified for the opening you've applied for and/or for which the employer is searching the database. But once the match has been made, the employer may actually look at your cv. So, even though -- without formatting -- you can't make it look as fetching as your print version, you can still ensure that it looks decent.
