CV articles - The Realistic Applicant

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The Realistic Applicant

We have arrived at a stage in the evolution of candidate thinking where there are many forces in the marketplace encouraging people to blow themselves up out of all proportion in terms of making aggressive claims to skills and achievement that simply bombard the person reading them, leaving no room for them to think or choose or consider what you are telling them.

This does not work. It makes you look naive and egotistical. Nobody wants to hear that you are better than them. No one is looking for superhumans. Applications of this type do not have the ring of truth and they actually confuse recruiters, who are left wondering what kind of job you actually want.

This false bravado in self promotion is encouraged across the internet by slick and commercially motivated CV writing services who deliver a product that appeals to the pride and grandiosity of their clients but actually delivers useless documents because they alienate the people you send them to.

My strategy, after 15 years of writing CVs for people all over the world, is to illustrate the candidate's valuable and sometimes heroic professional assets without going over the top in terms of claims. To achieve this I use a subtle narrative style which is also illustrated in The CV Masterclass and presented as a workbook in the CV Planning Matters course.

At the heart of this strategy is a narrative style that creates context for the reader so that they can become interested in you as an applicant, your career as a progression in which you have acquired valuable experience and the assets that you will leverage in the future. It is really very simple, but has become unusual in a world of thrusting ego mania.

It works, however. 99% of all my CV clients are delighted by the new person they find in their new CV, the real and valuable individual they were looking to express when they were trying out all that hype and meaningless spin.

Victor Taylor, who has so brilliantly designed and orchestrated this website is a Christian. I am a different kind of Christian. We share a moral core that is based on a shared world in which everyone can express their talents. This strengthens rather than weakens what we offer here. We won't be lying to you about what you can achieve. We won't be selling you easy answers when work is required. We know that your talents may have been buried by life, as ours sometimes have been.

That doesn't mean we are fanatics or exclusive in any way, nor that we are happy-clappy unrealistic. You will search the whole world before you find tougher and more realistic advice and the reason for this is that whatever anyone embarks on, it travels further if it starts with truth.

This is our mission statement, if you like. Thousands of people have successfully used the courses I have written and thousands more have moved on through my advice or CV writing. Clients have come from all countries, from Peru to Japan, from all cultures, professions and belief systems.

Whether you need a total CV rewrite or you just want to understand what you are doing wrong, this new website aims to provide for everyone what I have learned that people are actually looking for.

So, welcome - and keep coming back because new articles and courses will be added over the coming months as we evolve into our vision of a full service for candidates at every conceptual and professional stage. You'll find no meaningless division into "Executive" and ordinary CVs here.

© Steve Holmes 2005

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I'm getting positive feedback on the new look CV to people that have called me with regards to the old CV. I'm also getting fewer calls on techie jobs and better results for some programme level posts so that looks promising - hopefully interviewing will start soon. (IT - transition upwards)" --- A USER OF THE CV WRITING SERVICE