The Most Common CV and Resume Mistakes Part 3: Bomb the Profile

By Shannon Houde

Personal profiles are the bane of a HR manager’s life. How can so many words communicate so little? A hiring exec has about 30 seconds to extract the key facts from your CV, and if the time runs out and they’re still looking, you can expect to land up in the reject pile. So why oh why, dear job seeker, do you insist on making it so hard for them to see why you’re perfect for the role?

At the same time, personal profiles are the bane of a jobseeker’s life. Describing yourself and your achievements is about as fun as listening to a toddler sing the Lego Movie song over and over on a long car journey (indeed, many people would rather do that than sit down and write 75 words on their employability). But do it we must, and so we do, reluctantly, and frequently ineffectively. Too verbose and flowery, too full of ‘I’ statements, too vague or too long… As a sustainability careers consultant and former HR exec, I’ve seen them all. And luckily for you, dear reader, I have a foolproof, pain free solution to making them awesome.

In Part 1 of this series on CV and resume mistakes, I explained why your CV should be all about the market: appealing to the market, meeting the market’s needs, using the market’s language, communicating what the market wants to hear. In Part 2, I walked you through a deep, analytical dive into the job description to figure out what the market really wants and tailor your CV to nail it. This month, I’m taking you on a step-by-step journey to creating a personal profile that screams HIRE ME, without making you cringe.

Writing a killer personal profile means neatly and succinctly meeting the hiring manager’s requirements while staying true to you. A good one will set your CV apart from the hundreds of other sustainability applications pinging their way into their inbox. After all, it’s the first place an employer will look for a summary of why you might be a hot candidate, so it’s really important to nail it. Here’s an example of someone not doing that.

Does yours say something like, “I’m a former project manager with excellent people skills and organisational abilities and a strong passion for sustainability. Having spent ten years in telecoms, I have a thorough knowledge of the sector, and am committed to using my experience to further the sustainability agenda?”

If it does, it’s time to hit delete.

A personal profile should contain four sentences, minimal jargon and zero pronouns. Follow my tips below for a concise, clear, communicative statement that tells the reader who you are, what you’ve done, and where you’re going.

First sentence:

• Give yourself a descriptive title. The market is buying your work experience, so put that first. It can be aspirational. Say your title was "Events Planner," and you organized events for CR conferences. Now you want to be in marketing and communications within a CR team. You can put in your profile "CR Marketing Associate," because it does descriptively reflect what you’ve done, who you are and where you’re going next.

• Next look at the total years of experience. So, "CR Marketing Associate with 5 years’ experience" doing what?

• Then drill down on the issues. What is your knowledge of specific sustainability issues? Environmental? Community investment? Supply chain? Human rights? This brings us to: "CR Marketing Associate with 5 years’ experience communicating human rights and youth issues at a global level within the private sector."

Second Sentence:

• Define yourself with your skills. What are they? Can you match them up with the job description? Make sure that they’re relevant, you can back them up and they summarize what you’ve done. Don’t be tempted to include an "I," and certainly never speak in the third person! Think like a headline writer: maximize the space with keywords, and forget about the rest. "Diverse skills in communications, event planning, and cause related marketing."

• Then zone in on the sector. Give me more info on what you know, who you know and what scale your old company was operating at. "Diverse skills in communications, event planning, and cause-related marketing for a global telecoms company."

Third Sentence:

• What’s your Unique Selling Point? Make it clear what sets you apart as a candidate for this job. Have you worked abroad? Speak languages? Recently graduated? Published articles? "MSc in Sustainable Marketing and fluent in French."

Fourth Sentence:

• Identify your objectives. Let your audience know where you’re going and make sure it matches where the hiring manager needs you to go. Make sure that you’re not saying "My objective is to gain skills and experience working for an exciting company," i.e. "you the hiring manager are going to need to help me build skills." That hiring manager is buying something from you! Not the other way around. So let them know in your objective what you’re going to be selling or leveraging to help them achieve their goals. So more like, "Objective is to leverage marketing and communications skills to help a XXX firm build a more robust internal and external engagement program". (NB the XXX should refer specifically to the company, eg "a PR firm.")

Adding all this up, we get a dynamic personal profile:

"CR Marketing Associate with 5 years’ experience communicating human rights and youth issues at a global level within the private sector. Diverse skills in communications, event planning, and cause-related marketing for global telecoms and retail companies. MSc in Sustainable Marketing and fluent in French. Objective is to leverage marketing and communications skills to help a leading PR firm communicate to stakeholders the impacts of its sustainability program."

Compare the profile above with the profile below.

"I’m a former project manager with excellent people skills and organizational abilities and a strong passion for sustainability. Having spent ten years in telecoms, I have a thorough knowledge of the sector and am committed to using my experience to further the sustainability agenda. I am a fluent French speaker and recently completed a part-time MSc in Sustainable Marketing."

Who would you hire?

For more advice on avoiding the most common CV and resume mistakes, look out for Part 4 of this column next month where I’ll be focusing on how to wow a hiring manager with a killer achievement. In the meantime, feel free to contact me for some bespoke advice.

Shannon Houde is founder of Walk of Life Consulting, the first international career coaching business focused solely on the environmental, sustainability and corporate responsibility fields.

Image by photosteve101, via Flickr