The first thing to understand is that recruiters do not actually ‘read’ CVs. The precious document you’ve spent all weekend crafting into a masterpiece will most likely be given a 3 second review before the recruiter decides to keep you in process or eliminate you from the search. Don’t be offended or outraged about this – it is purely a consequence of the recruiter having to process hundreds of CV’s every day, often under unrealistic time constraints. What is actually being done is perhaps better described as ’scanning’ – a one blink glance for key elements within a document that determine whether you are to called or deleted. As a Job Seeker, your first task is to pass this CV scan – here are a five tips on what you’ve got to do.

1. Be Easily Contactable
That means mobile and email on the top of the first page. Putting this information anywhere else forces the recruiter to hunt for it within the document, and every additional second he spends doing this exercise increases the risk that he will give up and move on to the next CV on his list.

2. Be Conventional
Unless you are in a creative industry, its worth avoiding any kind of unnecessary formatting or design that could be considered gimmicky. That means backgrounds other than white, font colours other than black, any kind of non standard font, unconventional bullet points and so on. There is a difference between making your CV stand out, and making it look wierd. Unconventional formatting does the latter and will almost certainly lead to the delete pile.

3. Be Categorical
Of course, you are a multi talented, multi dimensional professional, but to pass the CV scan you need to be easily categorised into a role a recruiter understands. Strange as it may sound, but you need to pigeon-hole yourself on the CV. If you are a Project Manager, the recruiter needs to understand this in 3 seconds of opening your CV, so make it obvious with your headings, the language you use and skills you list.

4. Be Easy On The Eye
Bullet points were invented for a reason – use them. Writing blocks of text forces the recruiter to actually read – remember that’s not what that’s not what he wants to do. It’s time consuming to pick out those key elements within a block of text more than 5-6 lines long. Make a clear, related points within short paragraphs (try for 3-4 lines) and follow up with subheadings and bullets if you need to expand upon it.

5. Be brief
A recruiter can tell how long your CV is as soon as the document is open. Keep your CV to two pages if you can, four pages at an absolute maximum. Anything over that and the recruiter will close it down before they even begin to read.

There is a somewhat unpalatable rule of thumb in all of this; don’t make the recruiter work. Your best interests are served if you make as easy as possible for the recruiter to understand your CV and do so in 3 seconds or less.

Consider these five steps a sanity check on your CV – do you need to change it?

LinkedIn. Social media for grown-ups, the job seekers best friend and the end of the road for the Curriculum Vitae as we know it. Following Dan Schawbel’s excellent piece Predict the End of the Traditional Resume Here in Personal Branding Blog last week, here are 5 more reasons why LinkedIn will prove to be the ultimate CV killer.

1. DATA CURRENCY
CV’s get out of date, fast. As a static file it does a passable job of capturing a snapshot of your achievements, but it begins running out of currency the moment it leaves the safe confines of your desktop. You click send, it instantly becomes a historical document; the longer it’s out there, the more remote it becomes to your reality and the less relevance it has to you and your job search. Legacy CV’s – documents you sent several job searches ago – can sit on recruiter databases and online job boards for years after your original submission. These documents are so far out of date, they constitute misinformation on your professional status and are a significant threat to the message you are communicating to the employer market, never mind the negative connotation it delivers to your personal brand.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
Like all social networking sites, LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to amend your profile any time you are log into your account. Got a new qualification? Add it to the Education section. Got a new job? Simply Add A New Position. Looking for a job? Update your status to that effect. There are no files to upload, no documents to rewrite, no rogue files to chase down and delete. LinkedIn can be as near to a real time depiction of your current professional status as you need it to be, removing the need for anyone to ask the first question of any recruitment process – ‘are you looking for work?’

2. DATA ACCURACY
CV’s are marketing documents and they typically contain….embellishments on the truth. Lets face it, when you need a job, you’ll do what it takes to get one and that often means telling people about the time when you were the James Bond of company X or business Y. The more subtle may prefer the technique of claiming credit for stuff you never did. Sure, you knocked out a few spreadsheets, and they looked really good but doesn’t mean that you delivered the £100 million business critical project, buddy. Some even go right ahead and tell outright lies – dates, job titles, employers, responsibilities or whatever else comes to mind. I should know. I’ve hired a few of those guys.

Why do people feel free to lie on the CV?

The temptation is there because there’s a good chance that you won’t be contradicted until after you’ve been offered the job. Due diligence in the recruitment process generally takes place after the fact – remember the ‘offer conditional upon satisfactory references’ line? As crazy as it sounds, this is how we do it – interview, offer, then check whether the guy is crazy or not. References were invented precisely because employers wanted a system to assure themselves that the Richard Branson they’ve just offered the job to is just precisely who he says he is. It’s just never been a very good system.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
Of course, there is nothing stopping you from lying on your LinkedIn profile; however, it would be one of the most unwise and career limiting mistakes you could make. The information you put out there is public, it is open to challenge, and the people you are connected with are the very people who know you best – your work colleagues. Lying on LinkedIn affects them by their association with you and you’ll either see a mass departure of your soon-to-be ex connections or a complete lack of recommendations from the very people from whom you need it most. What’s more, the visibility of your connections allows a preliminary reference to be easily taken by any employer foolish enough to contemplate hiring you – without your knowledge or say so. Anybody still think this is a good idea?


3. DATA PRESENTATION
How many times do career coaches/advisors/your wife tell you to distinguish yourself from the hordes of CV sending maniacs by increasing your font size and inserting a few nice tables? And you know what? they do have a point – it is good to be different. Career expert Alison Doyle always gives great tips on CV writing. But being different brings its own set of problems, principally by making it a serious pain-in-the-ass for recruiters and hiring managers to compare candidates on a like-for-like basis. Having different looking CV’s means that recruiters are actually going to have to go to the trouble of reading them. This is why the application form was invented, basically an attempt to standardise the presentation of applicant data to increase human and computer efficiency. Some institutions like, anything to do with Her Majesty’s Government don’t actually accept job applications in any other way. But of course, every employer has a different application form, passing on the pain to the applicants who have to go through the rigmarole of completing different sets of forms for every single job they apply for – its difficult to think of a bigger waste of time for an already time stressed job seeker.

Why can’t there just be one standard template for presenting your professional experience….?

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
Regardless of the content you input or applications you add, the basic template for every one of LinkedIn 40 million plus users remains the same. Recruiters have long since become familiar with the information architecture of LinkedIn profiles and their ability to conduct comparative assessments has consequently become much more efficient. LinkedIn makes it easier for recruiters and hiring managers to make decisions – this is a good thing for everyone involved in the recruitment process, leading to quicker decisions, fewer dead ends and less time wasted.

4. DATA PROTECTION
We already know you lose control over your CV when you submit to somebody or somewhere else. What we haven’t talked about is how you’ve also lose control over the content within the document. Your carefully crafted two page masterpiece? Oh, you mean the one that’s about to be mangled by the incompatible technology stack of the job board you’ve sent it to? Or perhaps you mean the one that’s about to be deliberately altered by the recruiter who thinks its not quite fit for his particular purpose? If you think you have only have one version of your CV out there in cyberspace, then think again. If you’ve ever applied to an online advert, or uploaded one to a job board, the chances are you have many, many more.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
LinkedIn is a network of password protected profiles, where the owner has sole authority to create, edit, manage and delete information on his or her account. It is not a file that can be doctored or reproduced, nor is there a requirement for it be compatible with this reader or that database. Furthermore, any duplicate accounts can be easily located and removed by the owner. The security of the data on a LinkedIn profile is one of the primary reasons why it is so popular as a recruiting tool – it serves as a method of validating information found on CV’s. It has become the single most authentic representation of an individuals professional experience; its only a natural extension of the logic to see it replace the CV entirely once we get comfortable with information that is managed this way.

5. DATA DISINTERMEDIATION
Data disinterwhat? Yeah, that’s right. Data disintermediation. Or cutting out the middle man if you prefer English to recruiterspeak. It is not a stretch to say that the flaws inherent within the CV is one the central reasons why recruitment agents – and filing cabinets – actually exist. As CV aggregators, the recruiters grew an industry to fulfill an essential service for job seekers and employers alike – storing and managing CV information. So long as the CV was currency of the job market, the recruiters had a real value added role to play, playing match maker between those who had the labour and those who held the vacancies.

HOW DOES LINKEDIN CHANGE THINGS?
LinkedIn has enabled job seekers and employers to reach each other directly, without the need for intermediaries or the documents they monopolise. Recruiters have lost control of the information on which the industry is based, not because they’ve lost control over CV’s, but because CV’s themselves have been superceded by another way of presenting records of professional achievement. The implication is obvious – if job seekers and employers find each other through the information they exchange on LinkedIn, the need to produce a document replicating much of that information will increasingly be seen as inane.

SO, IS THE CV REALLY DEAD?
Culture lags behind technology. And when cultural change comes, there is no reason to assume that it will uniform across all sectors of the society. Indeed if we review the inconsistent adoption of what we now accept as standard tools, we can anticipate variance we what we’ll find in different sectors of the economy. Only last year, I worked with one public sector client where staff still shared one PC in order to send emails – this in 2008. So the CV will be around for at least a while, certainly as a backup document ‘for the records’ (those filing cabinets again) but it will be increasingly marginalised in the recruitment process in favour of more efficient, more accurate and more authentic media. And as Gen Y enters the workforce in real numbers, the erosion of its value will continue, until one day – soon – employers will simply stop asking for them.