How To Write A CV
September 9, 2011 by Damian
I was asked to write an article by the Wellington District Young Lawyers Committee about how to write an effective CV. They asked for somewhere in the region of 500-1000 but breaking the cardinal rule of keeping your CV as brief and concise as possible, I went a bit over the limit. (Also is it plagarism to use some of one of my own previous posts which I have done here?)
Anyway, here it is:
Writing or updating a CV is a job that just about every working person hates doing. We will find all sorts of excuses for not opening up that Word document and asking ourselves all of those horrible, nagging questions such as:
‘What is it that I actually do? Should I include a photograph? How long should it be? Should I include Personal Statements, Objectives, Interests? What size font should I use?’ etc etc.
Quite often, there are so many questions to answer that we decide to put it off until tomorrow or the next day or the day after that until all of a sudden, we see a job that we want to apply for and there is a mad rush to update the CV to get it in before the closing date for applications. If it gets to this point, you can rest assured that your final product is not quite as good as it should be.
Apart from perhaps your birth certificate and passport, your CV is probably the most important document that you will ever have. You may be the best lawyer with the best personality but if your CV is not strong enough, you will not get the chance to prove this in an interview. This will result in you potentially losing out on that dream job to someone who may not be as good a lawyer as you but who has sold themselves better on their CV.
So the first piece of advice that I would give is to truly understand the importance of your CV. It is not a document that should be thrown together at the last moment. It should be something that you continually think about, update and improve upon. You should regularly revisit it and contemplate whether it accurately reflects where you are in your career. If you treat your CV as a ‘living document’, your CV will be ready to go when that dream job does come up, thus alleviating all of the stress involved in starting from scratch or updating the CV that you used when you applied for your first job.
Secondly, never forget that your CV is actually a sales document. You are, in effect, pitching yourself to a potential employer. You are saying to them – ‘take me; I’m the best person for the job’. Therefore, like any other sales document, you need to make it very obvious that you have the skills and experience that they are looking for. Your CV is not a place for you to be modest. It should leave the reader in no doubt whatsoever of your suitability for the role.
Another important consideration which people tend to forget is that you are writing this document for someone to read who knows absolutely nothing about you. Consequently don’t assume that they will know anything about your previous employers, clients or cases that you may have worked on. Try to imagine what a partner in a law firm or General Counsel would want to know about your background and what potential questions he/she will have. Explain everything – if you leave too many questions unanswered, you will not get the interview; you will just straight into the rejected pile.
Before moving on to more specific points, it is important to state at this juncture that there are a lot of different opinions on what should or should not go into a CV. The points that I make below are therefore my own opinion only but they are based on years of reading excellent and frankly terrible CVs as well as from feedback from dozens and dozens of clients on what they like and hate to see.
So in no particular order:
You don’t need a photograph. It adds nothing to your application and is therefore unnecessary.
Try to keep your CV as concise as possible. However it is not a hard and fast rule (at least in New Zealand) that it should only be two pages. Therefore it is OK if you go onto a third or perhaps even fourth page, as long as what you have included is relevant and interesting.
Never use fancy fonts. How it looks on the page is not as important as what it actually states. (In saying that, make sure that everything is aligned and consistent). Use a reasonably well known font, keep it in black and make it easy to read by choosing a font size of around 11 or 12.
Personal Statements, Objectives – include them or not? This is probably the area that generates the most debate. My view is that knowing what your personal statement or vision is and having a career objective is fundamental to you getting a job but outlining these is best left to an interview. Your CV is there to convince the reader that you have the technical skills and experience to do the job. The interview is where you talk about your personality, strengths, vision, career goals etc. It is much more important that you use your CV to give a thorough run-down on what you have done in your career to date, outlining the cases or transactions that you have worked on, clients who you have worked for rather than stating that you are a ‘people person’, ‘are results focused’, ‘have excellent interpersonal skills’ etc. You may well be all of those things but reserve talking about them until your interview.
The next point should go without stating but unfortunately it has to be mentioned. Make sure that your CV does not include any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. It never ceases to amaze me how many CVs come across my desk that contain mistakes. Spell check is there for a reason – use it! Read and re-read your CV before passing it to a friend or colleague to read again before sending it to an employer. A simple spelling mistake will probably result in your CV going into the bin.
Finally when you have finished your CV, you must be really impressed by it. If you are not, then no-one else will be. I remember being at a seminar and the speaker said: “good enough is not good enough”. What he was trying to say is that if you do something and you think that it is ‘good enough’ to get the job done and nothing more, that is not enough. It must be the best that you can do and that is surely better than ‘good enough’. So when you have finally finished your CV, if you do not sit back and believe that this is best that you can look, then it is probably time to start again!
Writing a CV is a very difficult and time consuming thing to do. At Simply Legal, we can help you put together the best CV possible for you. If you want some information on how to do this, give us a call now or drop us a line. We would be delighted to help!
Beware The Rogue Recruiter
March 9, 2011 by Damian
From a recruiter’s point of view, I had a pretty scary conversation with a candidate earlier today.
This candidate is a very senior lawyer currently working in a pretty high profile role. He called me up last week to ask about a particular job which turned out not to be suitable for him. During the course of the conversation, I mentioned another role that I thought would be more relevant to his years of seniority. After hearing about the role, he said that he had already heard about it from another recruiter but would think about whether he wanted to apply or not and would get back to me this week with his thoughts.
He called me up today to let me know that unbeknown to him, the recruiter that he met initially had forwarded his CV to the client without his authorisation. This is just unacceptable behaviour on behalf of the recruiter and should never, ever happen. It is one of the central tenets of being a recruiter – never send a candidate’s CV to a client without their express authorisation.
This situation worries me because when other recruiters act like this, it gives the whole industry a bad name as it smacks of a lack of professionalism, honesty and transparency which should be cornerstones of our profession.
From a candidate’s point of view, it is obviously impossible to stop a rogue recruiter from sending your details out without your approval. However, there are a couple of things that you can do. Firstly, only work with recruiters who you trust. If you are unsure about whether a particular recruiter knows what they are up to, do not work with them. Ask to be removed from their database and go and find someone who you do trust. The recruitment process can be a long and involved one. You will get to know your recruiter pretty well. Make sure you like and more importantly make sure that you trust them.
Secondly, when you are in a meeting or on a call to a recruiter who is talking about various options, stress that is absolutely paramount that your CV only goes to pre-approved firms. Emphasise that point. Feel free to ask for a list of proposed approaches and enquire as to how the approach is going to be made.
Thirdly, ask for regular updates on approaches. Your recruiter should be doing that as a matter of course but if you are not getting the level of information that you need, demand it. It is part of our job to give you it.
To finish up the story of the senior lawyer above, thankfully for the agency involved, he was not too bothered that they had sent his CV off without his prior consent and at the end of the day, he did not get the job. However, he could have kicked up a major fuss and probably should have.
Your CV is a very personal document which should be treated with respect by a recruiter. If yours is not being treated with the respect that it deserves – do something about it!
The Importance Of CVs
July 15, 2009 by Damian
It never ceases to amaze me how little time and effort some people put into their CVs. I regularly see CVs with typos, bad grammar, inconsistent formatting etc. I remember one CV where a candidate wrote that he had excellent attention to detail but he had spelled ‘detail’ incorrectly! This sort of thing is unforgivable and would result in the CV automatically going into the bin.
Apart from your passport and birth certificate, your CV is probably the most important document that you will ever have. You may be the best lawyer with the best personality but if your CV is not good enough, you will not get the chance to prove this in an interview.
When writing your CV, two things should be paramount in your thinking:
(i) write it from the perspective of a partner/general counsel/hiring manager who does not know anything about you apart from what is on your CV. What information does he/she need to know about you before making a decision on whether to interview you or not? Just because something is obvious to you does not mean that it will be obvious to someone else. Explain everything – if you leave too many questions unanswered, you will not get the interview.
(ii) when you have finished your CV, you must be impressed by it. If you are not, then no-one else will be. I remember being at a seminar and the speaker said: “good enough is not good enough”. What he was trying to say is that if you do something and you think that it is ‘good enough’ to get the job done, that is not enough. It must be the best that you can do and that is surely better than ‘good enough’. So in terms of your CV, if you do not sit back and think that you look good on paper, you can guarantee that no-one else will either.
Writing a CV is a very difficult and time consuming thing to do. At Simply Legal, we can help you put together the best CV possible for you. If you want some information on how to do this, give us a call now or drop us a line. We would be delighted to help!