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Free professional CV review & CV writing services

New approaches to CV content

Very few CVs stand out, either in terms of design or content.

1. Issues with structure and design
2. Issues with content
3. Solutions to these issues

1) Issues with structure & design

Some CVs follow the US template from a WP program, which looks unoriginal, fails to carry structured information and usually relies on disembodied lists titled "Profile", "Objectives", "Achievements" or whatever.

The idea is right, to summarise what you are offering, but it really must be at-a-glance, not a great block of unconnected superlatives.

Design guideline: ignore the supposed distinctions between a CV and a resumé, between "chronological" and "functional". You normally need about 2 pages plus a great covering letter in whatever form works for you and your career path and it is perfectly possible to achieve all objectives with one well considered (and tweakable) document..

Many CVs follow an archaic British concept from the days of typing on stencils, huge lefthand margins, no attention to design or typesetting to make the document attractive

Are you trying to say that you are so inept with your WP program that you can only type in the default 12 point Times Roman that inevitably takes up 3 pages or more, that you are so useless with margins and paragraph styles that you cannot even fit your own CV to an attractive page? Time to re-invent your CV as a subtle and laid-back sales document (see solutions).

There are brave souls who actually think about design in an original way: unfortunately this often leads them to garish graphic effects, text boxes, charts, documents too complex to print and with fonts that recipient's may not have installed.

Avoid creating the impression that you feel design is more important than content; it makes you seem shallow; design must not overwhelm content, should use universal fonts in point sizes that fit and does not need shading, lines, boxes and graphics.

2) Issues with content

The information has no overall plan; poor decisions have been taken in terms of what to give priority to, what headings and heading styles to use, how to prioritise information. This tells people that you don't think clearly. The information is stale and skimpy, often culled from job descriptions or assembled in an unstructured list. This tells people that you cannot communicate. The information falls between two stools. It attempts to be effective by quoting results and trying to paint a picture of roles as opposed to mere chronology but these things are not done well enough.

3) Solutions to these issues (outline concepts)

The goal is a marriage of content and design.

Think of your CV design as a workspace, a framework for communication. Obviously you lead off with your name, but do you need all those personal details or can they be relegated to page 2?

Succinct introduction? Write it last when you know what your USPs really are.

In your case, what is most important? Work record? Technical skills? Education? Potential in a new career? Whatever it is, this is what demands prominence.What else needs to be included and what simple heading style will works? You now have a framework.Marshall your basic information so that it can be placed within that workspace.

USPs: list the main points you need to get across; these might be: experience, track record, training, skills-mix; methodologies, change programmes, what it takes for a new type of role in a new sector. This mix will be summarised in your application letter and it can help to roughly draft that first.

Evidence: the rest is basically corroboration: be ruthless with irrelevant facts; summarise detail (they can ask at interview); build the job/role narrative to arouse interest.

The art of the edit: write freely at first then edit and edit again.

For each theme that you are working with (or each job you are describing), briefly:

create some context: company scenario; situation you first encountered; changes illustrate your involvement: roles, levels, structures, visions, plans, implementations, initiatives, very briefly described offer your results, which can go way beyond targets and figures; your new product saved the company from ruin; you gave a not-for-profit organisation a national profile; you revolutionised the way the company's business structures. During any edit, some trace of the original complexity remains in the language like a homeopathic remedy. What you have discarded is not lost.

Going Deeper Than Ever

Introduction

Every month I receive several hundred emails or postings at my www.Monster.co.uk CV Forum raising increasingly complex problems with CV writing.

The recruitment climate has changed whilst the peddlers of clichés have been sleeping: almost everyone now faces merger and acquisition nightmares, redundancies, jobs not turning out as they were promised, periods out of work or in lesser jobs, career histories alternating between temporary and permanent assignments. Many people take time out or get so exhausted and stressed that they simply must make a dramatic career change to another sector.

Some people, faced with these problems, are turning to cheap and nasty CV writing bureaux or, worse still, to very expensive consultants who advertise in major broadsheet newspapers and claim to have a magic formula for accessing a mythical 'unadvertised job market'.

I have seen their work and it stinks. I have had heart-rending emails from people who have wasted over £3000 on more jobhunting tragedy. And the bulk of the ordinary misinformed CVs, over 95% of them, simply are not enough to present their owners as what I call a powerful candidate.

Major career change, like returning home from abroad or coming out of HM Forces, is another area where people make fools of themselves with ill-advised CV writing styles that try to deny the past. What could be more laughable than a Major in the Army describing himself as 'MD of a fast-moving SME' - and, believe me, I have seen this type of rubbish. And you have written it...

The Alternative

You can be a unique candidate with attractive professional assets, one who gets called to interview and then creates a new job or interim assignment from you skills. You can offer more than employers believe they want. You can deal with all this effectively if your CV is brilliantly conceived and written, which is what CVservices.net is dedicated to...

Further sections:
Grow Up and Understand the Market
CV Architecture
Professional Assets
The Narrative
Advice for Students & Graduates

Grow Up and Understand the Market

Recruiters earn their fees from employers, not candidates. In order to make money they have to persuade employers that they can locate good candidates who match requirements. This means that they have the difficult task of understanding the roles involved in a job and breaking them down into specific competencies (which is where the over-simplification starts to creep in).

Take a look at this fake job advert:

FAST GROWING SOLUTION PROVIDER NEEDS a versatile MARKETING MANAGER

To spearhead our roll-out of new products both nationally and internationally.

The ideal candidate will have experience in business to business software sales and marketing, backed by a good depth of IT knowledge and proven skills in generating new business and managing key accounts.

Of at least graduate calibre, fully qualified, with at least 5 years experience in a marketing or branding role, other language ability would be an asset, as would dot.com experience and proven ability to research the marketplace for potential new clients.

This tells you about an image of what the recruiter believes the employer wants; it does not tell you about the reality of the job.

Perhaps they have an overworked Marketing Director who needs a new No 2 who can also manage the new website or who might take over direct marketing to free the Marketing Director to play on the Internet. Ideally they would like someone who can contribute to sales and promotion strategy and backstop the Sales Director when she is abroad. Enough knowledge of German to take that part of her role off her hands would be an alternative blessing and if they could find a candidate with SAP expertise to participate in any new proposition in that direction then they'd be delighted.

You as a candidate need to stop being a victim of these situations and start understanding them. You need to stop looking where everyone else looks and start identifying needs for your skills. You need to be marketing yourself.

CV Architecture

There are no rules about a CV should be, though you will find lots of so-called experts recommending various formats and you will find lots of useless templates in your WP application, created by techies in the USA - some years ago.

A CV should look like whatever it takes to get your particular case across. There are some conventions but there are no rules. Tinkering with the headings will not turn a limp CV into one that rings with professional confidence.

You can't achieve any worthwhile results by working to a format, throwing in some action words and having simplistic headings like 'Objectives', 'Achievements', 'Profile' or 'Skillsets'. These do not turn a naïve CV into an interview-winner.

You need to think about what sections deserve prominence, what messages you want to get across and what unspoken messages you want to plant in the mind of the reader. Done well, as I demonstrate in CV Sage, mastery of this process can produce what appear to be miracles.

Professional Assets

The main secret of this process is to scrap your dependence on some crude notion of what a result might be, better sales, more profit, extended growth, whatever...

...And to start thinking about what you as an individual have contributed to your work: the deeper process of your professional life, the value you have added in creative terms or in organisational shaping or financial controls - the intangible assets you have as a candidate. You derive these assets from creating a strong narrative, as explained below.

Every CV needs an introduction of some kind but most people spoil it with lists of stupid objectives or masses of clichés about their teamwork and communication skills. This is not a beauty contest.

To come across as a really powerful candidate you need to sound like a provider of solutions. Your professional assets should be briefly and tantalisingly showcased in a way that you will justify in the narrative section of your CV.

The Narrative

Narrative means story and some people think that means endless long sentences. You can still use bullet points but I am asking you to think of your most recent or most important career highlights in a context where you justify in action the claims you have made in the introduction to your CV.

Do not rely on the original person specification or your contract of employment - it is a fantasy. Do not focus only on things and figures. Think about the real situations, the intangibles, the issues, the background structures, the planning, the actions, the correction of problems and the working towards change and solution...

You need to make your career sound real. You need to sound like a valuable person who understands things and can cope. You need to show that you can manage process and generate vision. You need to develop the writing skills to illustrate yourself, as complex as you are.

All these topics are covered in much greater depth in the online CV writing program CV Sage... www.cvservices.net/alpha/cvsage/

Students and Graduates

For you the implication of all this is even more important. If you send in a monkey CV that apes what older people do and describes your time on the supermarket checkout as 'customer liaison' you simply read like a prat.

You need to show maturity, using all your assets, work and everything else - using them to paint a picture of potential and mature career choice that accepts your innocence of the world of work but nevertheless contains enough about your character and actions to be attractive to the employers who are looking for talent.

Your value in the job market

TESTING THE WATERS

People take you at your own estimation of your worth. You need to present as the value you are. Focus is all important

There is no such thing as good enough when your career is at stake. The letter, CV, statement, website or email you use to apply MUST be a perfect representation of who you are, what you have achieved, what vision and insight you bring to your work, how you manage the tasks, strategies and relationships you work with and what you are likely to be contributing in the future.

Anything less than that fails to honour yourself and is unlikely to catch the eye, engage the mind and touch the heart of the people out there who are looking for someone like you to join them.

It is a huge error to be lazy or casual about the way you present yourself; it is a common error to be inaccurate and very few people ask for too much from life: the most common fault is not to expect enough.

Life is a mirror; what you put out has a relationship to what you get back. It needs to clearly establish your value; issues that might block your progress need to be dealt with in a mature way and not left until they become an embarrassing disclosure; things that you have started upon that show your potential should be included, even if they are not yet complete.

When your CV arrives it will be looked at by people who can tell at a glance what it signifies. Make sure it sends them the right message and then reinforces it in a totally professional way.

Over many years as a CV author I have come across one core distinction between people with exceptional careers and everyone else.

The most effective ones among us generally take action when the time is right and they are somehow ready. Such people can prosper even if they start life without much in the way of qualifications. Sometimes they have been loyal to one or few employers. They have proven themselves and been offered chances, which they have been well placed to take advantage of. Their approach to career issues reflects this personal maturity and they are clear about objectives, dignified in their contacts, impressive to others, able to ask the right questions and get the desired responses...

The rest of the population, by contrast, is never quite ready and always scrambling against a negative influence. Some have huge ideas, beyond their ability to deliver; some are always caught off guard by takeovers, redundancies, movements in the marketplace; some have become complacent; many are angry at their own lack of achievement and their job applications contain a sulky righteousness that growls quietly through the text as a hidden sub-plot... and some are just hoping their distance learning MBA will fix the problem!

If you are only human what you need badly is an insight into what effective people do so that you can model their behaviour. This is not an easy proposition, but at least you can start with written application materials that don’t let you down, that are sent to the right people for the right reason in the right mood or spirit of adventure.

The first thing to know is that recruitment agencies get their fees from employers and are motivated to find people for employers, not the other way round; hence random and careless distribution of your CV is not likely to yield quality results, nor are halfhearted applications to jobs you don’t really match.

There are some excellent recruiters in the world and well placed letters with well-designed CVs can yield amazing results, but it needs to be executed with self-evident quality and you need to establish some kind of dialogue with the people you approach. They are human and they appreciated humanity; they dislike being treated as a low value resource, which is why they are always complaining about being sent irrelevant CVs that don’t address what they said they were looking for.

As a CV writer I always create a perfect template CV and very rarely change it for specific jobs because what is wrong with CVs is not what recruiters say is wrong at all... in general what is wrong is that they are boring, uncreative, poorly designed, badly prioritised and above all: lacking in a warm and convincing human narrative that gets the story across quickly.

Many CVs sound like they have been borrowed from job definitions and as we all know, job definitions do not define jobs, they exist to protect employers in case they need to make you redundant and launch a disciplinary...

The bare facts of the roles you might perform are not what you do for a living. What you do for a living is contribute, create, communicate, persuade, organise, change, consolidate, develop, support, mentor, make accessible, provide, define, service, collaborate and...

And your CV, which can avoid normal grammatical rules by the way (so switch your Word 97 checker OFF)... needs to be telling people why, how and with what result you did and will do what wonderful things you can do...

Without resorting to unsubstantiated bullet point superlatives and yucky Americanisms... without mentioning things so far below your present status that they pull you down and make you look stupid for not being able to position yourself...

If you can do this simple thing you will establish dialogue with recruiters and achieve the reflection that the successful find in the world. If you cannot do this, then pay an expert to show you what it feels like to present as a new and successful you. The confidence that can be derived from knowing that how you present yourself has been truly focused and optimised will brighten your career search and boost you at interview.

Positioning and strategy

People take you at your own estimation of your worth. You need to be sending the right messages. This is an extremely subtle achievement...

What is not the problem

Most of the people who contact me for help with their careers materials already have a reasonably good CV that they have spent a fair amount of time developing. Almost without exception they are not happy that the documents they are working with are getting the results they need.

Typical problems include people getting THANK YOU, WE’LL CONTACT YOU IF letters from agencies, or finding that people are talking to them about the wrong level of job, or getting no response at all.

Usually, and wrongly, they think that this is because they have not tailored the CV to that job, so they do another version. Or they read some rubbish about chronological versus functional CV’s and throw out all the good bits in order to switch horses. These things do not solve the problem because they are not the issue.

It is absolutely possible to produce one generic and perfect CV that covers everything, for that job and any other, both chronological and functional. You just need to be a good writer who knows how to achieve the virtually impossible goal - of a neat, brief, alive, informative and effective CV that hits the target and generates interest. This is described more fully elsewhere on this information site.

When your CV arrives

It will be eventually looked at by people who can tell at a glance what it signifies; they do not need an idiot proof replica of the job description because they know that recruitment is a negotiation and a comparison. No candidate will have everything they might happen to like. Some candidates will have strengths they never thought of. If you dumb down your application to fit a template you may be losing a chance to exploit new possibilities.

EXAMPLE: I.T. professional working in ERP development and has walked out of his job because of a broken promise; he creates a traditional teckie CV that is full of repetitions about operating systems and query languages and the agencies offer him rubbish jobs; I shred his existing CV and write one that tells the story of an information architect and visionary capable of understanding the business case and proposing development work that could lead to innovative next generation products; he goes back to the same agencies and gets 6 interviews and 6 job offers within a week, at a much higher salary and having negotiated perks he wants like further general management training.

You need to tell them what the real message is, not what you fear is the right thing or the safe thing. You need to get out of that box of convention and talk to the reader.

If your career is all at senior levels then everything mundane you tell them, everything well below your skillset, is a waste of space that makes you look stupid because you weren’t able to prioritise the truly interesting stuff.

If you have no career yet and you pretend you do by setting out your CV in a traditional manner you make the reader squirm with embarrassment for you. Ten years ago, Jaguar Cars, as part of their graduate recruitment application form, were asking questions designed to get round such stupidity, questions such as - HOW DID YOU RECOVER FROM YOU WORST EVER MISTAKE?

Many of the people I write CVs for have spent the last ten years embroiled in takeovers, downsizing, culture changes and what used to be called business process re-engineering. They have never changed jobs but they write CVs that confuse people and look like there have been several employers. They fail to explain the most basic background information that would help someone understand their career and they fail to point out that as the ships sank they stuck to their post, reduced losses, managed changed, supported the learning organisation, recovered lost customers, whatever...

If this is the atmosphere you have worked in and you are still standing as the smoke clears, then make a virtue out of it.

Some professional roles are hard to distinguish

This includes doctors, dentists, lawyers, people who don’t have big projects and achievements to describe. It might also include people whose work is largely concerned with ideas, issue management, co-ordination, people in the NFP sector, people who simply do not have the tangible results in terms of facts and figures that sales professionals can flaunt.

In all these cases a bare definition of job roles becomes totally meaningless. Your text needs to be sophisticated enough to relate those roles and to describe how you worked towards what objectives, no matter how intangible. Intangible objectives, virtual teamwork, alliance relationship development, project definition, marketing propositions, information analysis, knowledge management... these types expressions, if used well instead of as mere jargon, can be part of an impressive career picture that shows resourcefulness, initiative, potency, added value and the shaping of change.

Generally speaking, people believe what they read and if your text takes in the complexities of your career, without rambling, without giving them a headache and in such a way that it demonstrates clarity and contribution - they will be interested and impressed and keen to ask you more at interview. Don’t just claim to be a communicator, be a communicator!

Appointments are a negotiated process

and grown ups act like grown ups, not like children facing teacher; if you go into this process with a dull and fearful CV that contains only bare bones information you will not be treated as a real acquisition worth offering a decent package to. Ideally, like my IT example above, you should be suggesting what more you can offer, more than they have even thought of so far.

You know what other people in your line of work are doing and you know how and why what you do has added value. The problem is not writing a certain style of CV; the problem is getting the knowledge you already have out into the open and down on paper. When you apply for a job the tone must suggest a person who has something to offer that is worth them taking an interest in and paying for; far too often the tone is GIS’A JOB, verging on the pathetic...

What you do not know is what other people are saying about themselves. I know that because I see countless CV’s and application letters, failed and successful.

The art of career narrative: WHAT TO SAY/WHAT TO AVOID

The worst mistake you can ever make is to write a CV that shows your anxiety...Nothing too cautious, pompous or formalised...nor a list of unsubstantiated superlatives and objectives, nor a copy of the job description.

Recruitment professionals live in a deluge of CVs, so many that they barely know how to cope. They have seen every error you can possibly make and if you want a witty summary of these go to the BAD CV page within CV Special.

It is a feature of modern life that we all receive too many messages to respond to properly or even to understand fully. It follows that unless the messaging in your careers materials is superb, different, relevant and original it may end up, it will end up, being glanced at but not even read through.

Imagine a person channel hopping when they have 50 TV stations to chose from, all with nothing on. This is how our recruiter feels. She is not looking for templates from a computer program full of idiotic "profiles", "objectives", unsubstantiated superlative bullet points and embarrassing jargon that nobody takes seriously - about your "communication skills" and your "ability to work in a team or be a self-starter".

Nor is he impressed by the lavish "executive folders" that some typing agencies will try to sell you, not by wild design, text boxes, flashy fonts, coloured paper, clever gimmicks...

People are impressed by the ring of truth and the scent of genuine intellect:

by writing that is unpretentious, by a mindset that is both divergent in scope and convergent in telling detail, by evidence of your ability to imagine what they really do need to know and to make that information rapidly intelligible.

There is no need for a CV to be embarrassing; it can read as a natural narrative of working life well conducted, with additional material that puts across the special qualities of the author; there are no rules any more about how it should look and because the CV form uses a special kind of grammar (that isn't in your Word 97 checker) it very rarely contains a true sentence and therefore can make more dynamic use of language, as an advertisement might.

The key source of error is fear and anxiety; some people cope with this by playing safe and being formal; others cope by being silly. You need to be daring but in a mature and focused way; to be relevant; to select and prioritise what you say about yourself; to link achievements to proof wherever possible and show each appointment or project as a process.

Never copy down the original job definition or the list your company puts out during appraisal time. Your CV needs to read naturally and tell a story. It must invoke in the person who reads it a sense of who you are and the best you have to offer.

They are looking to find the right person, not looking to reject the wrong person. The right person is not afraid, not boastful, not too conventional. The right person has lots of talents and a good track record, whether or not they have immaculate qualifications. The right person can be you!

Version anxiety

Received wisdom tells you that for every job you apply to you need a new version of your CV and covering letter. This is absolute nonsense. The so-called experts on CV writing, that is journalists who have read what other experts said five years ago, will always give you this advice but I have only had 20 clients out of 3000 in the last decade who needed two separate versions of their CV.

There is a core best story of who you are in career terms. Bending it to match a job description which in turn is only make believe is a stupid waste of your valuable time and it is not what I mean when I talk about getting noticed. Getting noticed is a 10 second opportunity at the most.

Usually all you need is one core CV document and one letter skeleton that you can adjust if and when the occasion arises. Your main goal is to show that you have understood what the recruiter is looking for and can meet or exceed their requirements. Or, if you are making a speculative approach, that you can imagine what their organisation may be needing in terms of human resource. Simply writing in with hope is a waste of time.

You need general but not particular relevance. You do not have to address every single point in the person specification individually - you can summarise and use language in an elegant way that will make you appear more intelligent. The letter of application is a golden opportunity to express your vision and your ability to provide solutions; it needs to be brief, rhythmic and brilliant... even daring.

If you have a CV with a logical structure and sequence that fully reflects your abilities it will probably stand as it is for any application you make in your field. That is why when the CV is originally created it needs to express all the functionality and achievement in your career.

The originator of that wrong advice making everyone panic was probably a recruitment consultant 20 years ago who was sick to death of boring and irrelevant CVs. It doesn't apply to you, today, because you won't be making dull, conventional and information-starved applications.

A "talking CV" and a lively letter will stand you in good stead for almost any occasion; have them ready on your computer for when opportunity comes; don't wait and then panic in the false belief that every application needs creating anew.

Recruiters can be very sophisticated individuals. There is no need to second guess them. Just lay out your case in a mature way and let them exercise their professional skill to assess what you have to offer. Be human to them and they will be human in return.

Selling Yourself Short - because you'd rather not be selling yourself at all

You've delivered all the deliverables yet an act of mammon has left you wondering how you will shake out in the new, improved management structure. It's seven years since they invited you to take the job. Scanning the recruitment horizon it seems that everything has changed and you aren't going to have an easy ride. What do you do?

Most people start by trying to bluff, to bluff even themselves. "Once a manager, always a manager" is the biggest self-deception that they rely on. Surely I won't have to start all over again. Most people start by tentatively putting out a pompous CV that reflects to a seasoned recruiter their doubts, fears and even their resentments. What they tend to get back is 25 rejections and one inconclusive interview with some dubious box number recruiters who don't really have a job.

At this point they may become vulnerable to cheap, outdated and recruiter-centric advice about how to improve your job application style or expensive advice about marketing yourself to a supposed open trough of "unadvertised job vacancies with top companies". Some consider franchises or setting themselves up as consultants. A lot of people intelligently consider re-skilling themselves or repositioning themselves for a career shift but they don't really know what or how and there isn't much realistic advice available.

Meanwhile, they continue to flail about with an application style that doesn't work and an underlying emotional subtext that reads between the lines as: "this one's a potential loser who hasn't adapted to a changing world."

If any of this is you now there is a remedy but it is not a push button solution. In order to build back your own confidence and potency as a candidate there is a shedding process to go through. Simply tweaking your CV according to some supposed perfect formula may improve your hit rate but not the basic message you are giving out. Starting that MBA you always promised yourself will frighten the bank balance to give you some ammo but the payback is in the longer term. "Recolouring your parachute" according to some outmoded and hugely over-optimistic self-improvement technique may rightly strike you as a lot of hot air that fails to address your reality.

Career change, like life change, is a transition of maturity that you already have the tools to make but as yet may lack the method. You have a value and it can be communicated in an accurate, structured and well-pointed way that promotes you to recruiters.

Step one is to look honestly at where you are now, ruthlessly isolate the rubbish in your product offering and admit that you need a damn good rebuild. Here at CV Services we address the issues in a positive but realistic way that supports you in marketing yourself in all your glory for a new Summer of career development after your Winter of discontent.

The World Keeps Changing - in an endless tide of acronyms and business models

Once they had time and motion studies for the factory floor and the power of positive thinking for the ambitious classes.

Now we have the customer facing, learning organisation with a flat structured matrix management style, virtual teamwork, enterprise resource planning, integrated logistics, 360 degree appraisal-driven succession planning.

Middleware technologies link legacy back end database systems with an SAP materials and accountables application and functionality is about to be enhanced with an e-commerce business model through a new global network providing 24 by 7 synchronised knowledge updates and a CRM based marketing engine providing geographic, demographic and undemocratic end user profiling that influences new product development strategy as the company's creative base is focused into new channels and workstreams allowing end-to-end synergies in collaboration with suppliers and alliance partners, not to mention 3rd party solutions consultancies.

We are all managing projects and going to meetings

We are all engulfed by the tidal wave of change. Around four years ago, when I was writing a CV for an American client, I often found it virtually impossible to discover what they actually did for a living. Now the disease is here and the majority of the people I encounter have in recent memory been subjected to takeovers, mergers, restructures, strategic repointing, consultants, more consultants, ERP systems that don't work properly, sudden reversals in management style, often redundancies, broken promises, forced relocations, disappointments and ultimately - the feeling of not being valued.

No sooner had they fixed something and made the organisation leaner and meaner than the entire process started over, this time with even more challenging targets, this time with 3 people doing the work of 15.

Many people spent the last decade in projects that did not necessarily work, including the improvement of their own career position. Once everyone did a time management and communications skills course; now everyone is working their way to or through an MBA. That's the trouble with change and improvement: if everyone does it there is no particular advantage.

Implications for the individual

All this stuff has to appear somewhere in your CV because they'll be searching for it and you're going to be lost if you can't match the cute jargon in the job advertisement.

But you were made redundant because your company adapted everything in its style and attitude but not its products. So it gradually sank, to be taken over by venture pirates who brought in their own even more aggressive management group.

You did the job they asked you to but you didn't get the results

There's nothing all that positive to say about the last few years. You're afraid it looks bad to potential recruiters. You long to find a stable old economy employer where you know what the job is and can stick to what you are good at.

What you need now, with apologies, is a new style of application where your CV reflects the positive values that you have stood for, despite the chaos you have lived through. You may need to be talking about your success in slowing down the death of the company rather than success being always a matter of growth percentages. You may need to be painting a picture of the variety, ingenuity and humanity with which you handled impossible situations. You may even need to comment on the fact that you advised against a certain strategy and were proven right, and it may be justified to talk about what you have learned, what you would have done, how you have adapted and survived and what tools this gives you for the future.

Reach forward in time

Many employers have no idea where the company will be in three years time. In a world of chaos, people are looking for some certainties, they are looking for solid colleagues, people with ideas who can get things done. No matter what has been the pattern of the last decade in your working life you now have greater maturity, better judgement, deeper knowledge, enhanced insight and more subtle human skills.

Now is the time, again with apologies, to scrap your legacy style of job application and start to actually address ways of selecting, combining and presenting information in which the focus is you and the qualities you have to offer (please see my article Adapt and Survive for more on this theme).

Disclaimer

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