UK CV Format | UK Resume to get Interview Calls

Have you sent your CV to thousands of job sites and not even received an interview call? If yes this post is for you- cv format

What format should you use while making your CV and how many versions should you have?

And there’s so many conflicting opinions of people on CV’s and resumes, So whom should you listen to?

So many questions and relevant questions while making your resume. And simply because of this, the most common feedback that I get from people is that they don’t know if their resume works in the first place because simply put, they aren’t getting calls.

Which is why in today’s Article, we are getting straight into,

What recruiters look for while hiring,

How you can make your CV stand out,

and the tools that can help you all along the process. And all of this boils down to one simple goal.

How do you make a CV that actually gets you interview calls And I talk about moving to the UK or a host of other countries to get that dream job or to study with that. Let’s dive in. So after you apply for a job, the recruiter gets your resumé and starts reading it. That’s the first step, right? Wrong. In most larger companies, tech companies, and most of the companies in the UK, Europe and the US actually use an ATS, which is an Application Tracking System. The ATS specifically scans your, as you may, looking for those keywords. And if those keywords are missing, your résumé goes straight into the bin. You are not getting that interview call. I know it sucks, but that’s how it works.

The first step for you to get right down to is mentioning the right keywords. If you don’t, you’re not getting that code. Or if you want that code, you can mention the right keywords right away. Now, of course, you might be like, I don’t know the right keywords, or I don’t know where to find the right keywords. I’ve got you covered. It’s really simple. Head over to LinkedIn and look for five job openings that have the same rule that you’re looking at. Copy all of these job descriptions and head over to a word cloud. You can use Monkey Learn (https://monkeylearn.com/word-cloud/). If you don’t know any other word cloud, copy all of these descriptions over there and it will throw up the most common words that are repeated across all of these openings. And those are your keywords. Now go back, add those keywords to your resume, and bam! Problem solved.

And once you actually do this, don’t forget to highlight these keywords on your resume and also include metrics which we’ll get to in right a bit. Now, if you see the keywords and none of them match any of the experience that you actually have, keep these three things in mind. If you’ve done an internship or a project in that area, go ahead and add it. Or if the keyword is a skill set that you don’t have any experience in, how about you actually start an online course that can help you get started, get acquainted with this, and then you can go ahead and mention it in your CV and say it’s an ongoing course. Now, if none of these are possible, you have got to ask yourself if you’re applying for the right role and if you have the right kind of experience that it requires. It could also be that the job requirements for this particular role are different across different countries.

Moving on. Once the green lights your resume and sends it over to the recruiter, the recruiter will now take a look and look for specific things in your resume. They’ll typically look for statements that describe what results you achieved versus what you did to actually get there. Your resume needs to communicate the outcome of everything you’ve done at your previous organization in a quantifiable manner.

Now, a very common misconception here is that these metrics need to be absolutely amazing numbers. That blows everyone’s breath away. Well, not necessarily. If you do have those absolutely amazing numbers, by all means go ahead and add it. But what’s equally important is relevant metrics. And this is really important for two reasons. These metrics will help the recruiters gauge what they can expect of you. And secondly, it will prove to them that you are somebody who tracks your own performance consistently, which is something recruiters are looking for, someone who takes accountability and ownership for their actions. Let me give you an example. Suppose you work in marketing. Of course, you can say that you ran a campaign for Valentine’s Day starring some of the biggest influencers in the industry, or you can say that you increased Clickthrough ratio by 10% and increased footfall by 8% in the store because of Valentine’s Day campaign that you ran, which overall led to an increase in sales of 3%. Now, these are not massive numbers, but they are very clearly quantified and outcome oriented. This tells the recruiter what your initial goal was and what you did to go about to achieve it.

And it follows the format that Google highly recommends, which is the X, Y, Z format. You accomplished X by doing Y measured by Z. Let me give you an example. This is a CV I received and this point was mentioned in that CV

“deliver top quality training, documentation, manual and tools addressing needs of specific specialist groups.”

Now, there’s no mention of metrics anywhere in this statement. So in the mind of the recruiter, well, you could have done an amazing job or you could have been absolutely terrible at it. There’s no way to tell. One way of improving this statement is to use the XYZ method that I just spoke about, that Google uses and claims increases your chances of getting recruited. Once again, it’s accomplished X by doing Y measured by Z. So if you take the point from above, if you restructure it, it reads like this.

“Decrease training time by five days by creating video training documentation tailormade for specific groups, resulting in an increase in satisfaction score by 15% “

Looks a lot better. Write. Another comment I often get is where people don’t know what metrics to use in their CVS or resumes. Simple. In most organizations you have performance reviews quarterly or yearly, and usually these performance reviews have metrics against which you are measured. You can use those metrics well. What if you don’t have metrics? There is a solution for that to ask. ChatGPT type

“I am a creative strategist at a smartphone company with 14 years of experience. Give me five metrics that I can use to evaluate my performance. “

It’s going to throw up all the relevant metrics that are important to your role, and you can use these metrics and structure your resume accordingly.

Look for typos.

Having typos on your resume is the equivalent of going to an interview with your shirt inside out. Not okay. And here’s the thing there are so many ways cheap and easy for you to get your resume proofread before you actually send it to a recruiter, namely your friends and family. Ask about 3 or 4 of them to proofread your resume to make sure there are no mistakes. Or if you’re like me and you don’t have too many friends who don’t come with 3 or 4 legs, you can of course use ChatGPT where you can copy your entire, as you may paste it over there and asked ChatGPT to look for grammatical errors. Or you can use a paid tool like Grammarly. Here’s a fact typos in your resume may basically show that you lack attention to detail and that you’re lazy, which is an absolute no go for a lot of jobs.

Structure your resume

Properly so that it makes it easier for the recruiter to read conveniently and in one go. To do that, it needs to check two boxes. Number one, is it structured well? Is this format appropriate for this job in a lot of cases does not accept two column CV’s. So unless you’re 100% sure that the company that you are applying to does not use ATS, I would suggest you go with a one column CV just to make sure that your CV doesn’t get rejected for absolutely no reason. Also, make sure everything is aligned properly and use simple, easy to read fonts. Don’t go with anything too fancy. The second box is is it organized in the right manner? Typically, most recruiters look for information in this format, so straying away from it will just honestly confuse them. There’s personal information and keep it short.

There’s a personal statement which comes below that and keep it at two lines at max who you are and what you bring to the role. Your work experience. From your latest experience to your oldest experience, you need to mention your company name, how long you work there and your role, internships or special projects, if any educational qualifications and achievements, if any. And when you do this, please remember that your resume needs to be two pages or less. I mean, think about it. Your resume might be the last thing this recruiter is reading for that day. They’ve already had an entire long day. Now, apart from that, they have to go home, pick the kids up, give them a bath, make them dinner, put them to sleep. They have another long day ahead of them. So if your resume is longer than two pages, it’s honestly probably just going to get glimpsed at, and then they’re going to throw their hands up in the air and just say, they give up and bam, you’ve lost your opportunity.

Moving on now you’ve built this incredible CV and the recruiter loved it and wants to get to know more about you. What do you think they’ll do next? They’ll most likely check your digital footprint, and in all likelihood, they’ll start off with LinkedIn. Once again, the format that you need to follow here is effort and outcome or work and impact. While with your CV, you need to be a lot more concise to make it fit into those two pages. With LinkedIn, you can go into a lot more detail about the work that you have done at your previous organizations. What also helps is LinkedIn recommendations, not the ones that you force your friends to write. And they write rubbish. Actual ones which validate what you say that you actually do at your organisation and prove that you do a really good job of it.

Something else that you should keep in mind is that most of the time, recruiters do not use the LinkedIn that you and I use. They use LinkedIn for hire as recruiters, which looks slightly different. So they typically have filters for years of experience, for skill sets, for roles, for locations. So you need to make sure that all of these things are mentioned in your resume. Now, beyond that, sometimes if the role demands it, the recruiter might also check your other social media presence, which could be YouTube. Twitter. TikTok. Instagram. So you might want to think carefully about what you want to post, especially if it’s something very polarizing.

For instance, if a recruiter visits your profile and finds post that you posted and where somebody was a little mean to you and you’ve gone off hurling nasty abuses at them, it might not go down too well. Now let’s get back to your resume. Another question I’m very often asked is if you should tailor your resume to every job. In an ideal scenario, yes, but it’s not always possible. But does that mean you use the exact same resume for every role that you apply for? Not really. So you might have these 2 or 3 roles that overlap with what you do, so you could honestly apply for any of them. But your resume cannot be the same for all of them.

Tailored Resume

For instance, if you’re applying for the role of a social media manager and a marketing manager, your resume cannot be the same for both of these roles. Instead, what you need to do is have 2 or 3 resumes for each of the job roles that you’re targeting. And for each of these job roles, you need to find the specific keywords that matter for that specific role in the process of we spoke about earlier, and go back and add those to those specific resumes, which is why all of them can’t be the same.

And now, of course, this can be a really tiring process, but fortunately for you, there is a solution and it’s a free one. It’s called TEALHQ https://www.tealhq.com/. This isn’t a promoted video, by the way, so you can use this tool to either pick up from your previous resume, or it will use your LinkedIn ID and populate an entire resume using that. Then you can make changes based on all the points we just discussed.

Like you can see, it’s very easy to add or change or delete points, or to create those three resumes tailored for different jobs without having to worry about indentation changing. For every time you change your resume, you can pick a format you like. Reorder sections. All very simple. So remember, make your resume as friendly as possible by using relevant keywords. Use relevant metrics wherever possible. Check for typos, check that it’s structured correctly, have multiple tailored resumes, and clean up your social media profiles.

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