CVs in 2024: Are they important?
By James Platt, Careers Adviser for LSST Birmingham
Source: MS Designer/LSST Marketing
A CV is just as relevant as ever in 2024, even with the rise of AI and application forms making you fill them in, even when you’ve just submitted that CV. As the graduate landscape continues to evolve and shift towards different market trends, the requirements to stand out with your CV will be different but there is time tested techniques that stand as best practice. Your CV should and always will be an ever evolving document that grows with you.
The modern CV not only encompasses your job roles but it must get across who you are a person and your passion for the role you are applying for. It is no longer enough to simply state ‘I entered data into database’, you need to bring impact and engagement to the reader. Research has long shown that hiring managers spend an average of 7 seconds on each CV, if you don’t grab their attention, you stand little chance of making it through.
Making sure that any skills and accomplishments are at the top of your CV is extremely important. You must tailor this to the roles your applying for, however, programming languages on your skills section has little relevance when you’re applying for a science teacher position. Make it resonate with the hiring manager and match those skills and accomplishments at the top of your CV match with what is in the job description or person specification.
Applicant Tracking Systems (or ATS) get a bad name, many people blame the systems for not getting interviews and say it’s all just robots and not humans looking at CVs these days. From my experience with ATS, it isn’t necessarily the systems fault, most of them just parse the data into an easy to read format and highlight any key skills or experience in your CV. They may rank you based on these skills but most of them don’t automatically reject you. Many times, however, based on the formatting of your CV, it can confuse ATS and make it input incorrect or miss out data that might pique the hiring managers interest. Thing like text boxes, multiple columns, strange formatting lines or borders can confuse an ATS and make it much harder to get across to a hiring manager who you are.
Key Sections of a CV
Personal information – Some people will put their whole address, age, ethnicity, every personal detail on their CV. Others won’t even want to put their phone number on their CV. Both are wrong in their own ways. All you need under your name is the best contact number for you, the best email for you and the general area that you live (unless you’re applying for a job in the hopes of relocating somewhere.) If the email you have is not professional, make a new one simply for your job applications. Inappropriate or immature email addresses won’t automatically mean you’re rejected from a role but it will make the employer think a certain way about you, so think about changing your fuzzykins567@gmail.com email. You could also include a link to your LinkedIn if you think it would help you get across a large amount of your experience but it isn’t necessary.
Summary/Profile – A paragraph or two at the top of your CV is essential as an introduction of you to the hiring team. Generally, you would start off with a brief summary of your CV in essence, giving them a taste of what they are about to read. You can then delve into your key accomplishments and skills that you can bring to an organisation. I would recommend you tailor this part of the CV for each role as you can change the skills depending on the person specification. It is always a good idea to include a sentence at the end explaining what role you are looking to get into next, and again you can tailor this with each role you apply for.
Work Experience – Most people here, who aren’t skilled in writing CVs may opt to simply write out their responsibilities but the fact of the matter is, hiring managers know the general responsibilities or a care worker or a cleaner or am IT technician. They want to know the impact you have made in these roles, not your day-to-day. You can include a one liner explaining the broad responsibilities of your role under each title if you wish but this is not always necessary if the roles are self-explanatory. Hiring managers want to know about things you’ve implemented, teams you’ve lead, processes you’ve improved, all the things that not everyone else has done. The more statistics and evidence you can provide to back the things that you’ve done up the better.
Skills – There are a couple of ways you can incorporate skills into your CV, with a dedicated skills section at the tor bottom, alternatively you can weave the specified skills of each job into the rest of the CV, either within your statement or into your work experience. The latter option is more time consuming as you have to restructure sentences and change around some of your responsibilities, but it can lead to better results and feels more natural for hiring managers when reading it. There is no downside to doing it the former way and having a dedicated skills section but don’t get lazy and leave the same skills there for every role, use the person specification to your advantage and help out the hiring manager as they search for those essential skills on your CV.
Education – Education should be at the bottom of a CV and can be quite a concise section. All that is generally required is the type of degree (BSc), subject of degree, name of the institution, dates attended and predicted or actual grade. You might also want to include any extra accomplishments during your time studying, for instance, if you were a student representative or a mentor to other students. This will show that you weren’t just studying, you making the most out of the whole University experience. Depending on the role you’re applying for it might also be worth highlighting any relevant coursework or modules to show you have a broader understanding of the subject.
Tips for Making Your CV Shine
Using AI to support your CV writing isn’t as crazy as it sounds and there are many tools out there that can scan your CV just like an ATS would. These tools can analyse the words your using and suggest better action verbs to make it more engaging, they can show where you might have used too many of the same word to avoid being too repetitious and they can show where your formatting might be letting you down and making hiring managers miss out on some vital information from your CV. It only makes sense to use the tools that are available to you and if you’re not using them in 2024, you’re falling behind the competition.
Don’t overload the hiring team with information, yes, you want to get across how great you are for the role and how amazing your experience is. However, unless you have 10+ years in the sector and you have many accomplishments, you can probably fit your CV on one side of A4. Two sides of A4 is the absolute maximum but if, when starting to write your CV, you always have one side of A4 in your mind as the gold standard, you’re less likely to waffle and keep writing things that aren’t really relevant. Just get across what needs to be known by the hiring manager and don’t speak about your jobs 20 years ago if they have no relevance to the job you’re applying for now.
Addressing Employment Gaps and Career Changes
You might have an employment gap for any number of reasons, maybe you were caring for children or a relative, maybe you had some health complications, or maybe you just wanted a career break. We all have our reasons for employment gaps, but the one thing you shouldn’t do is shy away from them. Hiring managers will ask ‘So what is this 3 month gap you took last year between roles?’ and if you don’t have an answer or refuse to acknowledge it, it will seem like you’re trying to hide something. Include the gap as a section in your work experience and if it was more than a couple of months, just explain what you were doing in this period to keep yourself busy and remain employable. Maybe you were studying, volunteering, looking at a career change, whatever it may be.
Career changes can be difficult, transferring all your skills from one discipline to another can be one of the most challenging aspects of your employed life but a change can be so worth it. Maybe you’re feeling burnt out with your current industry or have an interest in something you never did before. It’s all about your transferrable skills, for example, if you were a nurse, you have a lot of skills in patience, customer service, empathy, dealing with vulnerable people, this can lead to a career in many different industries. You might have to accept a more junior position in your new industry than you are used to but this will be an excellent learning experience and you will have the opportunity to start afresh.
The Importance of Visual Appeal
A big part of a CV is the design. There are so many CV templates out there that are, frankly, ugly. All you need is a sleek and modern design that isn’t too out there and gets your information across in the least painful way possible. As written above, the CV should be kept to one column in order to help the ATS parse your information correctly. Make sure that you’re not slipping in and out of different fonts and colours, just one for the entire document to ensure consistency.
Bullet points are a big thing for your CV, they’ll help attract attention to certain things and break up big walls of text into smaller, more digestible pieces. Depending on the role, this information about visual appeal might go out the window, if you’re applying for a graphic design role for example you might want to stand out by using your skills to design a fully custom CV in the companies branding.
Final Thoughts
Building a CV in 2024 isn’t too different than years past but you need to be aware of a few key things that the market is trending away from, how to help out the ATS and how to incorporate AI into your CV writing. Now, this information could all be obsolete in a years’ time so it very important to stay on top of career trends, especially within your sector as it will differ considerably between industries.
If you’re ever in doubt with your CV you can always reach out to your LSST Careers Adviser to support and write you a CV that will stand out to an employer and help you land that dream role!