About To Write Your First CV? Here Are A Few Tips To Keep In Mind

This is the second post in our two-part How To Prepare A CV series. In our earlier post we discussed simple design techniques you should adopt to make your CV more visually appealing. Here are a few more tips that will ensure your CV is easy to read and navigate through by employers/recruiters.

Capitalising on white space

It's very easy to forget about the aesthetics of your CV when you are so focused on content. Once you have your content down on your CV, take a step back and assess the overall 'look' of your document. Does it look visually appealing? As mentioned in part one, de-cluttering your CV is essential for keeping the recruiters engaged and your CV focused. Therefore to aid in making it visually appealing and easy to read, be sure to create adequate space between each paragraph/section/headings. Make sure your margins aren't too narrow that your words practically expand the entire width and length of the page. Leave a few spaced between your headers and paragraphs/bullet points, so as it doesn't look cramped or squashed.

Font

You want your CV to stand out for all the right reasons and one of the ways to make it look a little different to all of the others is the typeface. When we write CVs, cover letters or even standard letters, we almost always use the computer's default font style. Now imagine a recruiter looking through hundreds of CVs all in the same font - most likely Times New Roman or Arial. Although there is absolutely nothing wrong with these fonts, you want to use every opportunity you can find to make your CV stand out. Now, don't go crazy, I'm not suggesting you use one of the those barely legible fonts such as Lucida Handwriting or even a font like Comic Sans MS, which can be seen as amateurish. You want a typeface that is still traditional but adds a bit of personality. Perfect examples would be Book Antiqua or Georgia.

Highlighting certain words or headers

As mentioned earlier, to make it easier for recruiters to focus on the information talked about in your CV, it needs to be easy to read and navigational. One of the ways to achieve this is by highlighting certain bits of your CV using different styles, i.e bold, italics, underline, CAPS to allow recruiters to readily identify the areas they would want to read first or of most importance to them. So examples of this would be, capitalizing or underlining the different sections of your CV, e.g, "Education" and "Work Experience". By doing this, recruiters can jump around the CV without necessarily having to read from beginning to end. Italicizing your achievements, either at university or during your positions held at work can also aid a quick review but ensures that they stand out an get noticed.

For more tips on how to write a CV resume, visit our site by just clicking on the link.

To make it easier for you to get started we have provided free CV templates and professional CV examples which can be downloaded and edited.