Curriculum vitae 101

Back to Basics…

What has changed in a job application? We used to have details like Name, Age, Gender, Address, ID Number, Notice Period, etc on our Curriculum Vitae(CV) or Résumé. You may not remember this but we used to even have Cover Letters to go in front of the CV.

In this day of Technology, Recruiters(both in-house and agency) go through a bunch of CVs. We are talking in the hundreds for 1 position. So to cut out the “noise” we have boiled down the CVs to it’s essence to bite-size, digestible information.

Basic Information:

First things first, have your CV in MS Word format. Online CV or Résumé builders may come in PDF but the file may not be in a format that we can cop and paste from. With different layouts of CVs floating around, Hiring Managers will need to hunt for the details they are looking for(sometimes the search function doesn’t work on the PDF document). We have a standard format that we follow and send to our clients thus having it in MS Word would help us greatly!

Essentials like Name, Year of Brith, Notice Period and contact details are crucial and if you have any changed, please have it updated. We want to get in touch with you, we want to get to know you, what you are looking for, why you are looking to leave, how can the next employer be a better fit than your current. Your Notice Period is important too as it tells us how long our client has to wait for you to join them. It may seem like a small matter but we have seen candidates that have 3 months Notice Period. in Singapore, we would also like to know about your citizenship, why? Due to work visa/pass constrains. Some work visa/pass will require a certain number of locals in order to employ a foreigner. At the same time, due to project concerns, some of our clients look for locals or Permanent Residents due to the sensitivity of the project.

*If you’re a foreigner and have gotten clearance before, that does not mean that you will automatically get clearance for other projects.

Work Experience:

Have these information right below the essentials and have them in descending order with name of current employer, the period that you have worked there for (MM/YYYY), your position while you are working there and a couple of highlights of your duties and highlights during your time there(4 job duty highlights with 3 highlights during your time working in your current company. it’s ok to have less. Point we are driving across is to show what you can and have done during your time there).

Why have the period I work there MM/YYYY and not just in Year?

Because if you worked from January 2019 to January 2020 is 1 year of working experience while December 2019 to January 2020 is 1 month of working experience. If you put it as 2019 - 2020, it can be a bit misleading.

Side Note: Do have a copy that has a detailed version of this as it may come in handy if we need something indepth.

Skills & Certificates:

Have your Professional Degrees/ Bachelors/ Masters/ PhD/ PharmD in descending order with the period you studied, full-time/ part-time, where you attained your certificate, and what did you graduate with.

As we recruit for various kinds of roles, what your Technical skills listed in Primary and Secondary sections. Primary being you can do it with your eyes closed and Secondary being technology/tools that you have used before but not fluent in or you have played with it as a hobby or just started learning.

Salary:

Do not include this in your CV. Why? Because your CV will be circulated from us to the Human Resource team to the Hiring Manager and sometimes the Senior Management. How we solve this is right here.

Curriculum Vitae(CV) or Résumé out of date? We have a template you can use here. Just copy and paste!