1. Visual Presentation Matters

If you’ve applied for a job, there is a really good chance that so have several other people, if not hundreds of other people. A lot of people think that this means they need to stand out from the crowd by channelling their inner graphic designer

Your job is to make reading your CV as easy as possible, be it by human or bot. If you are applying for a summer job and want to go all out on Canva then this tip may be less appealing to you than others. However, as a general rule if you are applying for a professional job that is in an office (yes, this includes your working-from-home office) unless you’re in a super creative industry where they expect you to demonstrate your graphic design ability, keep it clean and simple.

The follow are some examples of bad resume formatting I have come across.

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Don’t use stupid fonts.

Stick to something like Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Calibri, etc. In case you’re wondering this isn’t limited to 16-year-old girls. There are plenty of grown men who make this mistake.

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Don’t highlight the parts of your resume you want me to pay attention to.

If your resume is well written the key information should be easy for me to notice. Also, highlighting parts of documents is a common technique for flagging the bits that you need to review so it looks like your resume is both yelling at me and unfinished.

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Don’t use lots of different fonts

and sizes

and colours

and emphasis

as a way of differentiating between headings, subheadings, etc. The default Microsoft style sets are awful so don’t use them as things get messy and hard to read really quickly.

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Don’t double space your resume because you’re worried it’s too short. If you’re at the beginning of your career and you’ve got a short CV that’s okay – no-one expects your CV to be five pages long if you only have five years’ experience. Don’t insult your audience by bloating the page count.

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In a future post I will critique a number of the Canva templates as some are better than others. For now, the best Canva template is probably the Paula Wilson CV, which is also really easy to replicate in MS Word or Google Docs.

2. Open with a Profile statement

In days gone by, the advice was to put an “Objective” statement at the top of your CV where you told the prospective employer what you were looking for in a job. News flash, this isn’t about your needs and what you want, it’s about the employer and what they want (yes, even in a hot jobs market). Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the employer is there to solve your “I want a new job” problem. You are there to solve the employer’s problem which is that they need an additional employee, so you need to explain why you are a solution to that problem.

A “Profile” is 4-5 sentences that tie together who you are, what your experience is and what you’re bringing to the table. Some sites recommend that this be in bullet points but it reads better as a statement. Whether you write it in the first or third person is up to you.

In a future post we will do a deep dive into how to write a good “Profile” statement.

3. Always include a cover letter

A CV and a cover letter should be a matching set wherever possible. Even if the application doesn’t expressly ask for one or lists the cover letter as optional you should submit one anyway. This is especially important if you’re changing industries or role types.

A resume is a statement of fact and actually varies very little between job applications as most of the jobs that you apply for are likely to be in the same vein. (If you apply for a data analyst job one day and a sous chef role the next, you might want two different resumes.) The cover letter is your opportunity to create a clear narrative for your work history and explain why you would be the right fit for the role. This is where you connect your experience to the job advertisement. If you are doing a career pivot or you’re levelling up, don’t expect the employer to do the hard work and figure out how your background translates to their role. Make it easy for them by connecting all the dots in a cover letter.

In a future post we will do a deep dive into how to write a good cover letter.

4. Clearly state achievements and contributions

Far too many resumes are lists of responsibilities. All this does is tell an employer what you were supposed to do, not how good you were at it. If you want me to hire you you need to tell me what you’ve actually achieved in your career. I want you to tell me about your performance, not just copy and paste a bunch of job descriptions.

Articulating your achievements and contributions is actually harder than people think, especially for women. Women achieve just as much as men do but have a fear of being considered arrogant if they actually take credit for their work. It takes practice to frame your work day as a series of contributions to a successful outcome. There are a lot of things we do each day that we don’t notice because we’ve been doing them for so long, but these are the things that earn us our paychecks. These are what make you a valuable employee and the whole point of your CV is to communicate this value to a stranger.

If you get to the interview stage you’re going to need to articulate your achievements and contributions anyway so you may as well put some thought into it now and put it in your CV.

5. Don’t lie

Wow. I am stunned at how many people still use creative licence on their CVs. From their experience to their qualifications, some people struggle to keep it real. Yes, I have even had people submit forged certificates. Not only did they not get hired they went on a “never hire” list for that company as well as my personal “never hire” list.

There are a lot of areas in life where faking it until you make is a great strategy. Faking it on your CV is a bad strategy. You will get away with it some of the time, but even if you only get caught once you will lose credibility with that employer forever. Your professional reputation depends on your credibility and integrity and you can lose that in a minute.

Make sure that if it goes on your CV you can talk about it in detail in an interview. If you can’t talk to it, take it off your CV.

6. Don’t get carried away with superlatives

Adjectives are an important part of a CV, but be careful about superlatives. You can’t write “experienced in X” over and over or else you’ll send people to sleep. There will come a point were you can start adding quantifying adjectives such as “significant”, “extensive”, “comprehensive” or “considerable” before the word “experience”, but not until you’ve got at least 15 years in the workforce under your belt.

I frequently see people early in their career journey embellishing their level of experience. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re three years into your career you don’t have “significant” experience in anything. Saying that you do will only make me think that you’re a little delusional and will likely get you bumped from the “interview” pile.

7. Don’t put your agency as your employer

This one is only relevant for people who have worked as contractors through an agency. It is common in a lot of industries to engage people as contractors, rather than staff. If you are one of the contractors that’s fine, but don’t put “Genesis Personnel Agency” down as your employer if you spent 12 months working at Apple. Instead, list the employer for this chapter of your career as “Apple (contractor)”. No-one cares who paid your wages, they want to know about the job that you did.

This also becomes important for online job applications because the software that scans your CV to pre-fill a form might overlook the relevant company name and you’ll get penalised for this.

8. Have a professional looking email address

I’m not an advocate of putting your full residential address on your CV for privacy reasons, but you are going to have to provide some way of contacting you. This is going to be your email address and your mobile phone number. You’re not signing up for a marketing newsletter here, you are applying for a job so your email address is part of the way your present yourself. If your normal everyday email address is something silly like funkystoner69@hotmail.com then this is not appropriate for your resume. A random alphanumeric string like 11hgi33k@gmail.com is also not appropriate as it looks like spam and will always get sent to the Junk folder.

If you don’t have a decent one already, set up a new email address with a standard provider (e.g. @gmail.com, @outlook.com, @icloud.com) and have it resemble your name. For example, if your name is Sarah Smith you might have smith.s.j@outlook.com. All mail applications are design to run multiple email address so this is going to be about 90 seconds of your time to set up and zero time to manage going forwards.

9. Don’t address your application to “Dear Sir”

Yep. We are over twenty years into the 21^st Century and people still send job applications addressed “Dear Sir”. Even if you’re applying for a STEM or finance job there is a good chance that your audience is not male. By opening with “Dear Sir” you are showing a level of ignorance (and potentially bias) and you’ve now got a black mark against you and you’re only two words into your application.

The safest bet is to go with “To Whom it May Concern”. There was a big push a few years ago to move away from this salutation but unless you know the actual name of the person that is going to be reviewing your application, “To Whom it May Concern” isn’t going to offend anyone.

I still see “Dear Hiring Manager” which is also gender neutral but no-one is called “Hiring Manager” in real life so it’s meaningless and looks a little dated.

10. Referees available on request

Unless you are doing an online application where providing referees is a required field, do not list your referees on your CV. You want to control the process here. If you provide your referees up front you won’t know when the employer is going to call your referee and so you will not have the opportunity to give your referee a heads up and talk them through the position you’ve applied for so they know the right things to say. You also won’t know where you are in the interview process until after the fact. You are better off withholding them until the recruiter or prospective employer rings and asks for them.

Also, referees need to be professional referees, not your aunt or next door neighbour. If this is your very first job then you’re not going to have any professional referees so you can use your hockey coach or maths teacher or church youth group leader, but it needs to be someone who isn’t related to you. As soon as you get your first job you need to make sure that you identify someone who you can use as a referee for your next job.

This is not an exhaustive list of resume tips but they are small things that you will get penalised for if you don’t get them right. They are also easy to do and you can implement them all today. Good luck!

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As the old adage goes, life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. The same applies to your career. If you are not taking the time to strategically plan your career then where you end up might be a long way away from where you want to be. If you don’t take charge of your future you’re at the mercy of other people who don’t have your career as their priority.

Just because you have a plan doesn’t mean it needs to be tattooed on your forehead. All plans can be revised and updated at any time. But having a plan for where you want to go will make it easier for you to communicate to others what you want and you will be surprised about how many people will try to help.

Another reason to have a plan is so that you train your own brain to look for the activities and opportunities that will get you where you want to be. If something unexpected comes up, you at least have a framework against which you can evaluate the opportunity.

So, what does planning your own career look like? It looks like deciding on what you want and going after it by breaking the journey to your ultimate destination down into steps and then communicating what you want to others.

After you know what you want and where you want to go, you need to train yourself to be open to the opportunities. If there are any special projects that are going to get you closer to where you want to go, consider participating. Get some experience that is outside your immediate job function so that you grow your versatility and understanding of the business as this will increase your opportunity options. Put your hand up for acting or secondment opportunities.

For example, if your five year goal is to be a project manager then you will need project team experience first. If there is a particular project coming up within your company, tell your boss that you are interested and tell the person heading up the project that you want to be on the project team. If no-one knows you’re interested in the opportunity you might not be considered. Even if you don’t get a look in on this project you’ll likely be front of mind for the next project.

For example, you have a finance background but you’re keen for a management role. There are no immediate opportunities in your department but one of the procurement managers is going on maternity leave for six months and the company is looking for an internal secondment for six months. Put your hand up! If you get the job you will not only get people management experience but the procurement and supply chain experience you also gain will come in handy one day. Even if it’s not for a decade, learning new skills is never a waste of time.

For example, if you want to hold an executive level role before you turn 40, then you will need a considered strategy and you’ll have some hard work to do. You will need to decide which functional capacity you want to work in such as operations, finance, HR, marketing, etc. What experience or qualifications are you going to need? To get an exec role there are things like profit and loss (P&L) accountability, managing large teams and board exposure that will help you get there. Whilst you can’t know the exact stepping stone opportunities in advance, at least you know what experience you are looking for. You can say things like “I am keen to get P&L responsibility”. It’s a lot easier to hunt for opportunities if you’re specific. Make it easy for other people to help you by telling them what you want help with.

If you are offered an opportunity that is going to take you away from where you want to go then there is no rule where you have to say yes to every opportunity. Just make sure that you evaluate the full scope of the opportunity. You might think that the task is boring but if it gets you visibility or working closely with some key people in the organisation it can be a great relationship building opportunity. You will also be able to strategically demonstrate your capability to the right people. This will pay off.

Some companies have a formal process for employee development plans, but the days of 40 years at one company with a gold watch and pension are gone. Most people nowadays will have what are called “portfolio careers” which can include over a dozen different roles. This means your employee development plan with your current employer is only going to be part of your career plan. If you know what your long term goals are it makes it easier to formally map out your development within the company. Your boss might be able to make some development suggestions but it is unreasonable to expect that your boss plans and manages your future (and the futures of everyone else in the team). If your company doesn’t have a formal development plan process there is no reason you can’t just work informally with your line manager but it becomes even more incumbent upon you to keep your eye out for opportunities.

There are going to be occasions where you have a terrific boss who is really good at developing people and can see your true potential but these bosses are few and far between. There are a lot of bosses who have no idea how to develop people, and there are some bosses who are so insecure that they can’t stand the idea of their team members developing as they might find themselves being leapfrogged. So you need to plan your journey.

If there is a promotion that you are after then you need to determine how you are going to differentiate yourself from the pack and get to the next level. There is an abundance of resources at your fingertips. Read, watch, learn. Find people that can give you advice in return for buying them a coffee. Throw your hat in the ring. If you get it, great. If you don’t, reflect on what happened, learn from the situation and plan what you will do differently next time.

I once worked with a person who spent 10 years at a company aiming for the CEO position. They set the goal early, clued key stakeholders into their long term objectives, and then they learned everything they could about the company. Each time they got an opportunity to act for a role above them, they performed as if the whole secondment were a job interview, and subsequently they inevitably got the promotion when it came around. Yes, they finally made it to CEO. You might not be comfortable with displaying such unfettered ambition but being clear on where you want to go is the surest way of making sure that you get there.

That’s the Career Advantage. Good luck!

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There is a myth that the world is a meritocracy and the person who works the hardest wins. This is wrong for many reasons. First of all, it isn’t the person who works the hardest who wins, it’s the person who delivers the best results. You can put in 12 hours days and achieve nothing because you’re working hard at the wrong things. Companies don’t pay you to work hard, they pay you to achieve outcomes. This is what people mean when they talk about working smarter, not harder. Often there is a strong correlation between hard work and achieving objectives but not always. Make sure that your effort is actually moving the right needle.

Second, it’s not always the person who is “technically best” that gets the opportunities, it is the person who is “best connected”. Like it or not, this is what it is. There is no point getting upset about it and refusing to play the game because you think the game is silly. If you insist on sticking to the merit game, not the relationship game, then you’re going to miss out. No-one is going to wait for you to get the memo. Merit is only part of it and the importance of technical competence is going to vary with the opportunity. Even the most technically brilliant person is going to find themselves hitting a career ceiling if they don’t develop relationships.

A key tip that I give people with great aspirations is to make sure that your boss’s boss knows who you are. Your immediate line manager directs your day-to-day work, but it’s the levels above him/her that have a better strategic view and know about the upcoming opportunities before your boss does. What you want is to be front of mind at least two levels up so that when an opportunity comes along your boss’s boss says “We need to do something about X. What about Alex? What is she doing?”

Building a relationship with your boss’s boss doesn’t mean undermining your line manager. It doesn’t mean that when you are unhappy with what your boss has said or done that you run off and dob them in or bypass them. All it means is that your boss’s boss knows you by name, knows what your role in the company is and knows what you’re working on.

How do you do that? You need to take the initiative to strike up a conversation. In the lift, at the coffee machine, walking down the hall. Some senior leaders are excellent and try to know as many people as they can and they will take the initiative with the small talk, but most don’t. It’s easy for everyone to know the senior leaders but it’s difficult for them to know everyone else because in some companies there are just so many people.

Discover some common ground or something that your boss’s boss finds interesting. How do you do that? You get over your dislike of small talk and ask questions.  Start with “How was your weekend?”, or if it’s a Friday, “Do you have any plans for the weekend?” Then you can file away the answers. A two minute conversation might reveal that your boss’s boss has three kids who play soccer, loves Latin jazz and just got a new dog. These are all things that can be used to continue the small talk at a later date.

I used to have a boss that would say “what interests my boss fascinates me”. This is tremendous advice. It doesn’t mean that you turn into a try-hard brown-noser who is trying to be best buddies with your boss’s boss. All it means is that if you know your boss likes to watch the Tour de France, for example, and it’s July (when the Tour de France is held), it’s not going to hurt to make sure you’re up to speed with the latest Tour de France activity. It doesn’t mean dropping $10k on a carbon frame bicycle and showing up to working in full lycra cycling gear. It just means that when you see your boss’s boss in the break room you can ask if they’ve been watching the Tour and you’ll have a nugget or two to contribute to the conversation.

Once you’ve established the small talk connection (this might take a few interactions), ask your boss’s boss what they’re working on. This is a double winner question. First, if you know what your boss’s boss’s priorities are then you might be able to help which will look good for you. Second, your boss’s boss might ask you the same question in return so you have an opportunity to tell them what you are working on. This means you always need be prepared to explain what you’re working on in 25 words or less. If your answer includes activities that align with what your boss’s boss is working on then that is excellent. This is what will give you the edge.

The easy measure for early success is when you pass your boss’s boss in the hallway and they acknowledge you by name. If you then get an opportunity that appears to come out of left field, you can be pretty sure how it happened.

That’s the Career Advantage. Good luck!

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The thought of networking terrifies some people and makes the skin crawl on others. Just hearing the word “networking” conjures up images of slimy schmoozing, neediness, sales and being worried that people will think you want something from them. It also means that you have to make small talk with strangers which is up there with public speaking on some peoples’ list of things they hate doing.

No person can achieve success alone. You might do most of the grunt work but there are always people along the way that have made key contributions to your success. Sometimes you may not even realise it until well after the fact. It can be as little as someone making an introduction for you, loaning you a piece of equipment or letting you sleep on the couch for a few weeks. There might be many people who have helped you but one thing is for certain: you haven’t done it on your own.

All of your dreams lie on the other side of fear, so you need to acknowledge the necessity of networking to achieve your dreams. If you can’t get past associating networking with sleaze, then think of it as building relationships instead. The magnitude of your success will be a direct function of the quality of your relationships. Every successful person in the world will tell you that there were a handful of key relationships in their life that got them to where they are today. If you can manage to build many high quality relationships then you will be unstoppable!

Bill Clinton was a phenomenal networker. In one of the great books on networking, Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, Ferrazzi tells us the story of a man named Jeffrey Stamps who met Bill Clinton at a party in 1968, when Clinton was only 22 years old and at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Upon meeting Stamps, Clinton pulled out a black address book into which he promptly entered Stamps’ name and the fact that Stamps was at Pembroke on a Fulbright scholarship. When Stamps asked Clinton what he was doing, Clinton announced he was going into politics to run for governor of Arkansas and therefore was keeping a record of everyone he met. Each night Clinton would record on index cards the names and other vital details of everyone he’d met during the day. Clinton then went on to become President of the United States from 1992 – 2000.

Whipping out a notebook partway through a conversation to turn a person into a diary entry is probably going too far for most people. If things are going well and you’re both getting along you might elect to make a LinkedIn connection at the time. LinkedIn is a terrific way to keep track of people but it shouldn’t be your only method as it doesn’t let you store additional information. The great contacts management feature of LinkedIn in the profile photos as the older you get the more people start to look the same!

In addition to LinkedIn, collect business cards where possible (although business cards seem to be disappearing quickly) and when you get home make some notes. Index cards and address books are a little last century so create a spreadsheet or database so you can record additional information, such as the date and place you met, anything interesting that you learned about them. There are apps for photographing business cards and having the details turned into a contact on your phone, although these aren’t perfect so always check the details have been taken off the card correctly and a “5” hasn’t been recognised as an “8”, for example. Another trick is to save the business card as the profile picture in your phone contacts.

Next level networkers follow up on everyone they meet. If you don’t do an in-person LinkedIn connection then this allows you to send a personalised message with your connections request. For maximum impact do this in the next 24 hours. If you met at a conference or some other event where there was a lot of general networking going on, then make sure you include in your follow-up a reference to a notable point or topic from the conversation you had.

If you want to go the extra mile, keep an eye out for something that may be of interest to people in your network. If you subscribe to any newsletters, newspapers or magazines and you see an article that might be relevant then send it through to your connection. If it’s behind a paywall don’t assume that your connection has access. Instead of just sending them the link, do them the courtesy of turning the article into a pdf and sending it through. Your connection may already have seen it but it’s likely they’ll recognise and appreciate the gesture. If they ignore you then it doesn’t matter. No harm, no foul. Don’t take it personally, people get busy. Don’t give up on the relationship because one gesture went unacknowledged.

On the flip side, you don’t want to turn into an unintentional spammer. What you’re doing is looking for touchpoints to show is that you listened to what they have to say and you’re there to help. There are more ways to do this than interesting media articles. Just make sure that the touchpoint is meaningful not generic.

Another example I have used personally is meeting a man at an event who mentioned that the company he worked for had just been acquired. His division was closing down and he was about to be made redundant. A few days later I saw a job ad that he might be interested in and sent that through to him. I assumed that he had seen it and sent it anyway as a touchpoint but he hadn’t seen the job and was very interested in it, so you never know.

Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker extraordinaire, used to say “You can have anything you want as long as you help enough other people get what they want.” This is so very true. Instead of framing networking as how other people can help you, look for how you can help other people. There are plenty of things that you can do that require very little effort on your part that will help others out tremendously, such as making an introduction. You will be surprised at how a little favour over here will pay off in a massive way other there. Don’t look for transactional payoffs (i.e. I do a favour for you and now you do a favour for me – this isn’t the mafia) just look for ways to pay it forward.

Your investment in your network is the biggest career investment you ever make – yes, bigger than your professional qualifications. Some people get the memo early but too many of us have had to figure this out for ourselves and after spending 20 years shunning the idea of “networking” realise that our rolodexes (contacts list for the younger generations) are a little anaemic. Networks take time to develop and maintain but it will be worth it.

Thank you for stopping by Career Advantage. In Part 2, well will talk about how to find people to connect with.

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One of the most frustrating things when you finally get yourself on the career ladder is that you have all these questions about the workplace game but oftentimes you don’t have someone to ask. If your family and friends aren’t working in that industry or that sort of environment they’re not going to be much help and they probably won’t even understand your problems. They might also find it boring and have no desire to talk about it.

Not everyone is cut out to be a mentor or career coach. Just because someone else is ahead of you on the journey doesn’t always mean that they are interested in helping you get ahead. Unfortunately, you are going to encounter a number of people who actively don’t want you to get ahead and throw obstacles in your way. Some of your peers will naturally know the game but you may not feel comfortable asking them. If you’ve got places to go you also don’t want to be showing your hand and your weaknesses to the competition.

Leaders are readers, sure, but the best-selling books don’t give you the quick and dirty tips that you want to know now. Anything that has been through a major publishing house has been sanitised within an inch of its life. Other times the information sounds great but what’s a real world example of how you can put that into action straight away? That’s where we come in.

Not only have we climbed the corporate ladder and have decades of experience to draw on, at Career Advantage we’ve read hundreds of books and articles and watched hours of interviews with the best of the business world. We will save you time by sifting out the golden nuggets that will give you the edge over your colleagues. Sometimes there will be hacks available, but you will still need to put in the hard work.

To be clear, Career Advantage is not a place that advocates playing dirty or playing in the margins of what is morally or ethically appropriate. Integrity is paramount to stable and lasting success. However, not everyone you work with will have the same a personal moral compass to guide their decision making. Career Advantage will give you the guidance that you need to navigate those situations when they arise.

If you’ve found your way to Career Advantage you want more out of your career. Welcome, you’ve found the right place!

Throughout this website, you will find “Career Advantage Pearls”. When put into practice, these pearls of wisdom are what will give you the edge, the advantage. Some are obvious, some will be a surprise and a few might even be counterintuitive but they are worth collecting. All of them are valuable and some of them are priceless. Good Luck!

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