A Friend Has Asked You to Look at Their CV

A friend from your old bootcamp sends you their CV on a Saturday morning. They have applied for forty jobs and heard back from two. Be honest, they write. What is wrong with it?

Be honest is a hard instruction to follow with a friend, because the honest answer might be that it is two pages of duties and not a single result. It is still the kindest thing you can give them. Forty silent rejections are already telling them something, and they are telling it far less clearly than you can.

Start by reading it the way a busy hiring manager reads it. Quickly, once, in under a minute. Then write down what you remember. That list is roughly what a stranger takes away, and it is usually shorter and stranger than the author expects.

Then go back and read properly. Look for the gap between what they did and what they describe. Responsible for maintaining the reporting service says very little. Cut report generation time from four hours to twenty minutes says a great deal. Most CVs written by engineers describe duties, because duties are easy to remember and results feel like boasting.

Limit yourself to the three changes that will make the biggest difference. Usually that means the first third of the first page, the strongest two or three results, and anything that makes the reader stop and frown, such as unexplained gaps or a list of thirty technologies.

Give the feedback in a call rather than in comments on the file, if you can. Tone gets lost in a document full of red marks, and you will both learn more by talking. Ask them questions as you go. What was the result of that project? Who used it? Their answers are usually better than what is written down.

Be careful with your own preferences. Fonts, layout and whether to include a summary at the top are mostly taste, and hiring managers disagree about all of them. Spend your attention on content.

Then ask to see the next version. Feedback on a CV only really helps once it has been used, and the second read is where you find out whether it was understood.

– Asael Shinder