In a pool of many students who graduate every year from universities, many CVs are created since many are looking for jobs. So how does yours stand out? We spoke with Byiringiro Ramu the Recruitment Associate at ITM Africa and here are his suggestions.
First of all the do’s, you need to include your email, your name, and your address. Most people create emails that are not associated with their names and if you need to personalize your CV, you need an email that correlates with your name.
Second, you have to include your academic achievements such as your education history, the schools you attended, and even the specializations you had.
Next, you have to include your employment history and if you don’t have one you can always add your volunteering or professional internship history or even a field that you aspire to work in.
The third thing, you have to include the skills and the certifications you have. Most of the graduates don’t have employment history but they have many certifications they acquired during their studies. So you may have to include that because it adds to the personalization
of your CV.
Among 1,000 CVs, you need your CV to stand out which brings us to the fourth thing– personalization because there are many CVs and you need something to stand out. of
all those CVs.
The fifth thing is the references. Most of the people who are graduating don’t have professional references but if you have volunteering activities, if you have many professional internships you can even add your references from your university such as maybe your lecturers even in the clubs so they can also add to personalization of your CV.
Next up are the don’ts when writing your CV. Do not add unprofessional fonts and colors because when you have many colors maybe yellow, green, or even many colors they create a certain sense of unprofessionalism to a recruiter.
So it’s better if you do not add those fonts and unprofessional colors. The next thing is incorrect information. You may find many people have incorrect information for example they lie about some qualifications, they lie about many things such as their employment history and when you go for the background check you find they did not work in those things.
And the things such as email addresses. You find a person has an invalid email address, or you find a person has a phone number that is not correct. So please double-check when you’re creating the addresses and even do not add incorrect information.
The fifth thing to avoid when creating a CV is adding unclear information. For example such as timelines. Many people are not specific when it comes to timelines of their employment history, their educational background and so and so. So please be specific when it comes to the timelines. It’s very useful when it comes to recruitment.
A bonus tip is to use platforms that can help you stand out. For example, using your LinkedIn because it’s the professional way to reach out to recruiters. You can even reach out to the people who are recruiting for ITM and many other organizations.
