1. Profile Picture

You can take it as a basic rule of the social web that anything that allows you to humanize a profile constitutes an opportunity to make a first impression and hence serve as an introduction to your potential as an employee. Twitter profile pictures as thumbnails like everyone else’s but they nevertheless serve the vital function of introducing your character in an at-a-glance manner. Use a profile picture that is clean, clear and non controversial – the rules for this as exactly the same as those for LinkedIn as I posted a few weeks ago

Hint: no Bart Simpson avatar

2. Bio

The strict SMS inspired character limit is perhaps one of the reasons behind the phenomenal success of Twitter – you simply do not have the space for BS. In the Bio section of the twitter profile page, you get no more than 160 characters to present your professional character. Marketeers call this the slogan – the ability to summarise what you do in as few words a possible. Here, you get your shot.

Hint: Do not forget key words – Bio’s can be searched

3. Background

Upload your own background, whether that is a photo or a picture of your own choosing or a design template you fixed up on Photoshop or on any one of the free-to-use Twitter background designers available to use. It’s easy to do and it’s important in telling people that you are active on the platform enough for it to be worthwhile contacting you. For people with a little more design savvy, it might be worthwhile trying to put up some text in the background – most professional tweeters do this, but in the era of point n click, it’s debatable how useful this really is.

Hint: Free to use tools here and here

4. The Link

Twitter also provides an opportunity to provide a link to another site on it’s profile page. This is a vital part of the profile page for the Job Seeker, simply because you can link it to another site where you have a more detailed version of your CV. This could be your own domain, your blog, a profile url for a public facing website (LinkedIn, Facebook, Google) or a link to a job search profile on an online platform such as Innovate CV or VisualCV. Twitter then becomes a gateway to a more detailed and informative site showcasing your professional skills.

Hint: Buy your own domain – it’s low cost and well worth the admin load

5. Tweets

The central pane on your twitter page is devoted to your activity – it’s a historical record of the things your tweet about, complete with whatever information you have linked with them. You need to clean this up if you are about to engage on the jobsearch. If you are a newbie to it or are newly using Twitter to support your job search campaign, then you have the opportunity to build an image through your activity every bit as powerful as anything else you do on the platform. If you are an architect, then tweet about the latest developments in your industry, the latest software tools for the work, the state of the job market for people in your profession. You will quickly build a picture of a professional who has high interest in his field, can speak authoritatively on key topics and is up to date with current affairs.

Next time: Twitter For The Job Search #2: Who To Follow

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1. Localisation

There is no ‘CV Master Template’ which will work in every situation. As any job seeker who has transitioned to another industry or tried to look for work in another country will know, what is good in one context can be considered a faux pas in another. Take, for example, the continental European convention of having a profile photo in top right hand side of the CV. Go without it when you are applying for a job in Paris and you will almost certainly be eliminated from the recruitment process by Parisien recruiters. Why? Because you will be appear an outsider, and to the recruitment mind that simply means higher risk of not translating into a deal. Conversely, go with a photo when applying for exactly the same job in London and you will get an identical response from their UK counter parts. Sadly, in a market like this, it makes no sense to look like you don’t belong.

Lesson: Know your audience and localise your CV before you put it out.

2. ‘Geo Tag’ Your CV

So Facebook Places is out, but until someone produces a working recruitment app featuring geographical data, Job Seekers will have to ‘geo tag’ their CV’s the old fashion way. Recruiters always search with location filters in order to source candidates who are within commuting distance of the job. This is often done through the simple expedient of inserting geographic terms or geographic indicators into a Boolean search string. Of course the recruiter will never send you a letter, and he probably call your mobile ahead of your land line, but he might use “SE1″ or “0208″ in his Boolean search string. So when you don’t put these in, you’ll be missing from the search result, and potentially missing out on opportunities. Understand there is a trade off with privacy but when you are looking for work in a hyper competitive labour market, you’ve got to balance risk and reward.

Lesson: Know how a recruiter does his search

3. Keep It Monochrome

Come on now, you’ve got to know that putting colour in your CV is a high risk move! But still, we’re seeing documents with sky blue backgrounds, red underline and purple text. I can understand the logic of seeking to differentiate, but ‘colouring in’ your CV is not the way to do it. Outside of creative industries, err on the side of caution and go with a colour palette no one can complain about. That is black and white.

Lesson: Colour to differentiate? More likely to irritate. Play it safe

4. Exercise Version Control

We all love Adobe, but PDF’s are generally not a good idea when submitting your CV to agencies, job boards or even end employers. It might surprise to know that many have not downloaded the requisite reader to open the document, and anything that adds one more stage to the process of getting your CV read might be severely limiting to your chances of getting the job. Secondly, many proprietary recruitment databases do not have the ability to handle a PDF – you might be sending the CV’s, but you’re getting dropped out the system because of technical incompatibility. Thirdly, PDF are not readily search-able documents. The strength of PDF’s is that they can’t be altered; but can also mean that they can’t be searched by recruitment databases – and all that work you’ve put in to optimise your CV with relevant key words has been a complete waste of time.

Lesson: Assume whoever it is that needs to read your CV is less technically advanced than you are.

5. Fear Printers & All Other Hardware Peripherals

I do not like you

Print it out and proof read. And then get someone else on a different printer to do the same. We all know how unpredictable printers can be – no matter how far technology moves on, hardware peripherals remain a law unto themselves, especially in how they want to display your CV. Whilst it’s true that CV’s are mostly read on screen, its equally true that CV’s are always printed out if you get further in the recruitment process. What you don’t need is to put in the hard work of crafting a great CV only to see out of the corner of your eye a mangled document clutched by the unimpressed HR Manager just as you interview for the job.

There’s sure to be more. Any body else have any Oddball CV Tips That NO ONE EVER talks about? Let’s hear about them!

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1. Job Title

Recruiters almost always search using Job Titles first. It should come as no surprise that if a recruiter is looking for a Product Manager, that the term ‘Product Manager’ is going to feature prominently in his sourcing strategy. This is important if you aiming for a role with a job title that you’ve never held – something you might do if you are going for a career progressive move, transitioning between industries or if you have been working in an organisation that has uses non standard nomenclature. So, quite simply, if you have a target job in mind, the job title of that target job needs to appear in your document.

i.e Product Analyst (responsibilities of a Product Manager) or Product Analyst (target job Product Manager)

2. Industry Jargon

Jargonize your CV. This is important if you work an industry that has uses it’s own distinct terminology (Clue: most of us do). Recruiters tend to have an inbuilt bias for candidates who come from the same industry as the client organisation they are recruiting for, under the presumption that most employers carry that bias for in industry candidates themselves.

i.e If you are a Product Manager within the payments sector, putting the terms
‘Issuing Banks’, ‘Acquiring Banks’, ‘Merchant Implementations’, ‘Merchant On-boarding’ would probably be a good idea. They are terms that are unlikely to be appear on a CV of a non payments candidate and hence a recruiter will likely insert them into a Boolean search string as a candidate filtration technique.

3. Multiple Occurrence

Where you rank on the search results list is almost as important as appearing on the list in the first place. If you end up on page 17, believe me, it won’t matter how good your CV might look – the recruiter will never get that far to read it. A simple yet effective way to improve you page ranking is to have multiple occurrences of the relevant search terms within your document. SEO marketeers have long known about this ‘keyword stuffing‘ technique as a means of gaming search engines, and similar tactics can be usefully deployed on the CV. Most online CV databases and almost all proprietary recruiter databases can rank results based on occurrence; so you’ve got the tricky but do-able task of putting in the relevant terms into your CV as many times as you can get away with. A sensible technique is expanding upon a base term.

Have a look at your CV and see if you can come up with any improvements based on the 3 rules I’ve outlined here. Remember not to go overboard – there is a big difference between optimising your chances and blatantly tricking your way past search filters. At the end of the day, your CV will have to be read by the human eye at some stage and you need to come across as a top ranking candidate, not a clever clogs who has just gamed the system.

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1. It’s a School Disco

Remember School Disco? Actually how could anyone forget. As a teenage rite of passage, it’s as excruciating as they come, inflicted on the impressionable by the well intentioned yet horribly misguided. The iconic moment is of course, at the very beginning, when the music comes on and nobody wants to be first on the dance floor. Twenty years on, the embarrassment hasn’t even begun to fade.

I think the Video CV market is like a school disco. The music is on, but no one wants to go first on the dance floor. Not the employers who could be running video CV only recruitment campaigns, not the recruiters who won’t spend on tech if they don’t have to, not the job seekers who see little point when there is no overt demand from the other two. The Video CV market is waiting for a decisive first mover, and for that mover to be quickly followed by the market they are addressing. So far, we haven’t seen it.

2. There is an asymmetry of production vs consumption

CV’s are marketing collateral and consequently, they need to look good. So far, every attempt at video CV’s has failed in this regard. Whilst the production technology available to most home users is good enough to do a Skype call with Grandma in Hong Kong, it’s nowhere near good enough to make it case for it to be on your CV, much less be a replacement for your CV. It makes massive difference that we live in a media saturated age where we are inundated with HD and 3D quality video’s – we now have enormously high expectations of what a good video needs to looks like. In effect, we have an asymmetry between production and consumption – we consume a far better class of video quality than we can produce ourselves. Can it really be any surprise that our own speak-into-the-camera moments look so excruciatingly bad, when our internal reference point is the latest Lady Gaga vid or HBO’s Hard Knocks?

3. You can make terrible, terrible mistakes

The margin is for error is small, and yet the penalties for a mistake can be enormous. When it comes to the Video CV, one man more any other knows this is to be true: step forward Aleksey Vayner. A Yale graduate in 2006, Vayner’s Impossible Is Nothing video resume, featuring the karate chopping, tango dancing, weight lifting protagonist himself became an Internet sensation when that went viral later that year. If you haven’t viewed this piece of Internet history, it’s because poor Aleksey has spent the better part of the decade tracking down and deleting the video everywhere it has appeared online. Fortunately, I’ve tracked down a copy on one of the remaining sites that still host it, and so for your education, click this link.

Amazing, I’m sure you agree. To be fair to Vayner, I think he deserves credit for his give-it-a-go, pioneering attitude. That said, there’s no getting away from the fact that the video was an unmitigated disaster when measured against his intentions. Instead of becoming a showcase for his employability on Wall Street, it became a viral comedy piece which was widely lampooned across the globe. The chastened Aleksey Vayner has by all accounts since disappeared from public view, and it wouldn’t be unkind to say that his mistake has had significant, long lasting, career limiting impact. When a video CV carries such a degree of risk, compared to a very low level of reward, is it any wonder that the format hasn’t been widely adopted? Right now, it is only for the fearless, desperate or satirical

So where does this leave us?

It’s not here yet, but it’s got to happen at some stage. The quality of candidate information captured through rich media is clearly more compelling than that conveyed by a two page text based document. And if Seth Godin’s right in saying that the interview is really a 5 minute sniff test – then the savings that could be provided by a video bio would be tremendous value to job seekers, recruiters and employers alike – potentially the elimination of some of the stages of interview. We just need for these three obstacles to be overcome.

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