Curating top-notch content for your CV
About the series
Once again welcome to the series. If you’re here for the first time and you want to start from top, below is the link to the series intro.
and the previous post in this series is below.
That said, we all at some point in our CV making journey, struggle with curating content that needs to go in to a CV. We end up adding a whole lot of content and that too in a “not quite great” way which leads to a mediocre CV.
In this blog we’ll focus on a framework that I use to ensure my CV always portrays the best of me. It ensures, that when a recruiter reads my CV, they know I am not just looking for a job, but I am looking for the next place where I would make a huge impact. With that, let’s get started on the 3 step process.
Stage 1: Dive deep into your experience (4 parts)
This step is crucial to adding depth and personality to your CV, so it’s important you do not rush this process, spend a day or two on it and pull out as many data points as possible. This works best if you have access to a spreadsheet document like MS Excel or Google Spreadsheet or equivalent.
Open up a spreadsheet and create 3 columns:
- What did you do.
- What was the outcome.
- How did you measure the outcome.
Part 1: What did you do
In this column, write every single thing that you’ve done for the company in the lowest possible detail. It’s important to not filter anything, the goal is to bring in your entire work experience in a single place so that we can analyse what adds the most value and what brings together different aspects of your experience to your CV.
In a CV you’d want to showcase different aspects of your career like tech skills, leadership, mentoring, taking initiatives etc. That’s what this part focuses on.
Now that you have all the contributions jotted down, it’s time to bring things together. Start reorganising the rows to bring contributions in a single company right below each other and then group them based on projects such that the contributions to a project are right below each other.
Part 2: What was the outcome
In the last blog, we spoke about impact and how it plays a huge role in your CV being selected or rejected. In this exercise we’ll start adding the impact statements to your contributions. It’s okay if you can’t add impact statements to everything, not everything you did had a huge impact.
The goal of this exercise is to filter out important contributions and not so important contributions.
Don’t worry though, we wont throw away any contributions, we’ll just find a better way to add them without taking a lot of space. Remember in the last blog, we also spoke about thinking about your CV as prime property, the cost per word is very high.
Your impact statements would depend on the kind of work you’ve done in your experience, some would be direct, while some would be indirect (like enabled someone to have an impact). This activity would add depth to your experience and would also substantiate your claim about looking for the next place to have a great impact.
Part 3: How did you measure the outcome
Data is the most valuable aspect of your CV. It is that one thing that will make your CV stand out. The most consequential quotes in this space is:
You don’t improve what you don’t measure. Data is what segregates success stories from failure stories, high impact from low impact, meaningful contributions to business as usual contributions.
Remember from the last blog, companies don’t care what you did for the last company, they care about what you can do for them. Saying you can improve sales is one thing (everyone says that) but saying you can improve sales by 42%, the CV exuberate with an assurance of a proven track record and confidence.
That being said, there would definitely be contributions where you don’t have any metric but the contributions are critical and its okay to add the contributions without metric. For example, you wrote a library that improved the security of an application. You cannot measure security unless you work in a cyber security domain and have data on number of hacks before and after but in general you might not and it’s completely okay, the contribution is still very important but be vary of how many such examples are present in your CV.
Pro tip: When adding metric data think about “before” and “after” stages. This would give you the right impact. You won’t always have “before” numbers but it’s always great to have them.
Part 4: Tag it
Once you’ve reached here, curating the content becomes a lot easier. In this stage we’ll “Tag” your experiences with things that bring them out. This can be certain aspects of your personality like leadership, mentoring or it can be tech stacks that you worked on and want to highlight.
There are two main reasons why something would be on your CV:
- It brings out a certain personality traits like leadership, mentorship, initiative taking, curiosity etc.
- It directly talks about your professional skills and your ability to make a meaningful impact.
So make a new column called as Tags and add tags to your experience. Ideally these tags would be a single word and wouldn’t be too many per experience.
Stage 2: Rank it
A CV should be a tailor fit for a given job description.
I am quite sure you’ve hear that line a lot of times but always thought its a little too much of effort, especially when applying to a lot of jobs and that’s exactly how I thought. Thankfully, if you’ve completed Stage 1, it will get a lot easier, let me explain how.
Example 1: Let’s say you know two programming languages Java and Python. When applying for a Java role, projects where you used Java are more important but when applying to a Python role, projects where you used python become more important.
Example 2: Let’s say you have experience in product management and in product design. When you apply for a product design role, you’ll be including designs you’ve worked on, improvement in customer engagement with your designs and so on. If you’re applying for a product manager role, your ability to build products, familiarity with scrum, previously built products is something that you would highlight.
But don’t get me wrong, you should always mention both as your strengths. A developer with familiarity with multiple languages is great and a product manager with product design as a skillset is also a great combination.
That said, now we will add a column for each job family that you would want to apply for and then start to rank each story based on how much it contributes. For each story think about the two reasons we spoke about in the Tag It section.
Stage 3: Converge to Curate
Now that you have all your experience in one place and ranked, its time to start converging the stories into meaningful sentences which will be used in your CV. To do so, we’ll follow a very simple framework:
Accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z.
A few examples of this:
- Reduced overall time from 10 days to 4 hours by automating a process.
- Increased company revenue by 10 million by discovering a new segment in the market for our product.
- Enhanced system security by building a framework to secure end to end communications between applications.
- Improved application performance by 10% by optimising database query.
Some points to notice from above examples:
- They all start with action words (improved, enhanced, reduced etc).
- They are all phrased in Active voice and not in passive voice.
- Not all examples have metrics, some only have what was the impact and how was it achieved.
Picking the right form of metric to showcase impact
While it’s important include metrics and numbers, it’s really critical to pick the right form of number. Using this effectively would allow you to showcase the right scale. There can be two kinds:
- Relative: using percentages.
- Absolute: using exact numbers.
Using relative metrics
Let’s say you optimised a DB query to run in 5 milliseconds which took 10 milliseconds, now a 5 millisecond gain is kinda negligible unless the system is very critical. Instead write,
Reduced service response time by 50% using optimisations on DB query.
The above line denotes the actual impact you had which is made the system twice as fast instead of focussing on some low level details. It also removes unnecessary units like milliseconds.
Using absolute metrics
This is ideal for situations where the before metric and after metric are in two different units. For example:
Reduced overall time from 10 days to 4 hours by automating a process.
Its tricky to convert the above metric to percentage and even if you do you’ll get a number like 6000% which doesn’t make sense on a CV.
Finally after performing everything, your excel is now complete and now looks like:
The above are just some examples and not to be taken literally but notice in the screenshot, how in some of the columns there is a dash (-) which means that those experiences would not add any substantial value to my CV for that job family, and hence they would be left out, but this would be different for everyone.
Where do we go from here
In this post we learnt about an exercise that allows us to dive deep into our work experience to extract, measure, rank and articulate it in a way that brings out the depth and versatility of our careers.
Next in the series:
- We’ll apply all the concepts we’ve covered as part of the series in into action and draft our CV/Resume that stands out.
- Talk about how can you use different sections of the CV to convey different aspects of your professional personality and the depth of your experience.
- Compare and contrast different types of self assessments and which one to use so that you stand out.
We’ve come quite far from where we started and there’s a lot more coming so please stay tuned :)
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