The Future of written Résumés - CV is not dead!
CV is dead, long live the CV!
Even with the rise of Internet and professional social media platforms, résumés are key elements of a good job application.
Don’t be afraid and lose motivation when you have to write it. You feel like your résumé design isn’t good enough? Lots of tools exist online to help you giving it a fresher look.
Find inspiration from the most original CVs to make one that is looking like your personality, not someone else’s!
Many articles online are forecasting the extinction of the written classic résumé. With the emergence of LinkedIn and other professional social media where exposing your experience is being really easy, we can think that CV is going to die sooner than we thought. But for now, the famous Curriculum Vitae is well alive and doing well, and let me show you that taking care of it is the most important thing you should think about when you consider having a new job!
In fact, CVs remain the best way to show and communicate your experiences, assets, and skills, compared to other platforms and medias we know today.
Résumés are personal, they are testimonies of our story and experiences.
Then you might say that videos and LinkedIn profiles are as much personal as a classic CV and are as even better as they have no “length limit”, they are online, accessible… But CVs are still the main resource used by recruiters to find new possible candidates and select applications. Therefore, résumés are important in recruitment processes and should not be neglected.
Why are they still important?
Even with the rise of new technologies and Internet, simplifying the access to hundreds of thousands of information, recruiters will look up for a CV. No matter on what platform you are, where you applied or if the recruiter directly got in touch with you, he or she will want a CV. Either to communicate with his/her manager or client, the CV is the best way to send an application and group all the information necessary for a job.
You can think that making a profile on LinkedIn or a video (as we see everyday on our LinkedIn/Facebook feed) to introduce yourself is easier than making a proper résumé, and in fact, you are right to think that way first. Nowadays, dozens of tools exist to help you make high-end videos with no required knowledge in editing. Making a LinkedIn profile is easy as well and looks like a CV so, why bothering yourself writing it?
Résumés are really easy to make, and don’t require you to be a designer, thanks to hundreds of pre-made models in Microsoft Words for instance. In that case, you just have to type in your information, and you have a neat CV to introduce to your future company!
LinkedIn has a major counterpart, it is online. No internet means no profile, no information… And we don’t think that for your first interview, you will bring a screenshot of your LinkedIn page. LinkedIn is a great tool to make yourself visible online, but Curriculum Vitae, printed or not, are convenient documents to be sent and transferred to whoever you want without any trouble!
The length of your CV matters. It is hard to be concise with 20+ years past experience or not to be concise when the only experience you might have is an internship. But we believe that limiting yourself to maximum 2 or 3 pages is the key to a first good impression. Keeping it short allows you to present only the key points of your career and skills, making space for more discussion with the recruiter during the recruitment process and avoid sharing useless information. Finally, it makes it easier for you to adapt your résumé to where you apply, and make every application powerful.
As said above, the content. Adapting your CV shows that you care about what the company is looking for, and demonstrate your analysis skills and the relevance of your profile for the mission. I will add only one thing to this: write things you can talk about and interrelate it with the job.
Simplicity is important. It must be easy to read and go through. Many studies show that recruiters spend little time on CVs, and they will spend even less if it is unreadable. So use clear fonts, different sizes, not too many colours and a clear overall design. Make it consistent. But, as I say below, no needs to be a graphic designer to have some clear résumé, many softwares and websites are doing the job for you!
Canva: it is a great tool to do some design for free. You have some templates available and it is really easy to use and to make high-quality résumé on this platform.
Microsoft Words: many, many, MANY templates are available online to download. The only thing you have to do then is fill the document with the information of your choice and the work is done.
Google Docs: now having templates as Words has. You can find (and make) templates, not only for résumés but also for all sort of documents.
Rules are meant to be broken, that is a fact. Therefore, here are some wonderful examples of original résumés that are really impressive, showing dedication and efforts in their realisation.
People can be really creative, so feel free to browse the Internet if you lack of inspiration, you will find thousands of examples and even templates you can reuse and customise as you wish! But remember, this is about you, not someone else, so make the templates you find online yours!
Design attracts the recruiter’s eye, but content attracts the recruiter’s heart!