10 Tips for Writing a Great CV Guest post by Elinor Bat-Genstein, Founder & Managing Partner of CommuniTech. Elinor has worked as Marketing Director, Product Marketing Manager, and Sales Operation Manager in the Israel high-tech industry since 1996. Elinor established CommuniTech in order to develop best practices and domain expertise, with a special emphasis on Product Marketing for global companies, so as to utilize her personal strength in this domain.
Today CommuniTech is concentrating on placement of, and training for, Marketing and Sales position worldwide. Growing up in Paris gives Elinor a clear advantage while helping Israeli organizations in placement projects for their European subsidiaries. Before founding CommuniTech, Elinor was the marketing director at the Israeli Mobile Association (IMA), Global Director of Marketing at Personeta, and Product Marketing Manager at Amdocs, from where she has a vast and global network of candidates. Learn more about Communitech here: www.communitech.co.il.
Today when the market is full of excellent candidates – the first buffer for you to get an interview is your CV. Your CV is your most important marketing tool – worth investing.
1. Personal Details – Must: Name/ Phone number and email
Do not forget email; companies use it for communication!
You can add other parameters like if you are born elsewhere – but marital status, children and your age are not relevant for getting a job and should not be listed
and no picture on the CV
2. Try not to exceed 2 pages (and yes – we know you have a lot to write about yourself)
Do not have more than 5 bullets on each position
3. Font: people are reading your CV.
If you want recruiters to like you use: Ariel font – size 11
4. Colors: I personally adore it; if someone is writing the company names in another color, it makes it easy to follow
5. Companies’ logo – if you worked for well known companies – add the logo to the CV – this always makes an impression
6. Executive summary – personally I am not a fan, but in some cases when it is hard to categorize the person, try to have a short one : write 4 bullets about
a. The role you can perform
b. Your market experience – Telco/ Web / Security/ Clean-Tech
c. Geographic expertise (Europe / APAC / Africa etc.)
d. Your strengths
7. Always write a short sentence about the companies you worked for – do not assume all recruiters know all the market (i.e. ” leading provider billing-ordering and CRM for telecom and IPTV”)
8. Education vs. Work Experience – what comes first? The order should be as follows: if you went to a well known university: put in on the top page (you worked hard to get in and it worth credibility). However, if you chose an unknown university but your career path is impressive: put the education on the bottom (and spare us your high-school name…and “megama”)
9. Prizes and awards: write about every single prize you ever got and if your company gave you a bonus awards / top grades – mention that as well.
10. Tips per roles:
a. Sales: write your customers’ names and size of deals
b. Marketing: write which PR agency / firm you used and which conventions you promoted
c. Engineer: write about all the technologies you are familiar with
A good CV is all about MARKETING!
