Lights, camera, action, CV

Your resume isn't a list – it's a performance. We've been helping some would-be stars to pass the audition

Here is the laconic Las Vegas showman Dean Martin. Look at the table in front of him. It’s his preparation kit, all laid out in meticulous order, the things he needed to get into character and ready to perform. Terry O’Neill, the photographer who took this shot¹, describes the scene:

I really wanted to capture a moment of the private Dean Martin because he was the total opposite of what we all thought he was. I mean to say that he wasn’t a wise-cracking, always drunk bon vivant. He was quiet and utterly professional.

Deano’s ‘disarmingly dishevelled elegance, breezy charm and baritone ballads’ (as one writer put it) made him an immensely popular comic, actor and singer in the 1950s and 1960s. He was renowned for his laid-back, seemingly effortless ability to perform and sing. I love this picture because it captures beautifully the effort that goes into seeming natural and, well, effortless.

We all need to channel our inner Dean Martin when we apply for a job. Making yourself sound natural takes a lot of hard work. A CV has to be as meticulously organised as Deano’s dressing table. Most people’s CVs turn up dishevelled – and it’s not deliberate.

A few weeks ago, we offered to help five people write their CVs. We were slightly overwhelmed with the response, but we helped everyone who got in touch. We ran two workshops, critiqued the CVs and asked our ‘candidates’ to rewrite them, twice – all over a fairly intense three days.

Here are a couple of sample reactions:

Forthwrite helps you look in the mirror until you pay attention to who you are and what you really want to say. They don’t play with the lighting or let you put on any grease paint - they’re for being truthful, authentic, confident and direct. We spent a few sessions looking at my CV, my consulting offer and playing around with possible alternative realities. Time spent with Forthwrite is entertaining, brutal, insightful and you always feel like you're making breakthroughs.

I find your belief in the power of communication and in the uniting force of shared humanity uplifting. I thought the group format worked really well because of your ability to draw stories out of people and to make play out of the hard and occasionally heartbreaking business of job search. 

Let’s summarise the key parts of the sessions and, with kind permission from the participants, share some of the best examples of what to do and what not to do. If you know anyone in the painful throes of writing their CV or resume, we hope this will be a revealing and useful set of golden rules.

Here’s the big thing we noticed. To a man and woman, everyone who submitted their CV did so with an accompanying email that was charming, intelligent and personal. Very Dean Martin. These email introductions frequently made us smile and were often moving. Everyone we worked with sounded very warm, wise and human. Here’s an example:

I created my first website when I was eight. I grew up poor, am father to an eight-year-old daughter who is my priority and have been with my wife since aged 16 – we’re 36 next birthday.

The group of people we had attracted was wonderful: a talented CEO building and growing businesses in off-the-beaten-track parts of the world; a project manager specialising in healthcare and NHS effectiveness; a PR specialist promoting art and culture at top institutions; a City of London economist; a technology wunderkind.

Then we got to the CVs. Not one matched the promise of the introductory emails. In fact, they bore no resemblance at all. Deano had left the stage and had been replaced by Dean from accounts.

How could such a talented and interesting group of life stories die so suddenly on the page?

POLONIUS: What do you read, my Lord?

HAMLET: Words, words, words

Reading the CVs, I felt Hamlet’s world weariness: pages crammed with words, meaningless, clichéd and yawningly familiar.

What happens to people when they start writing their resumé? Perhaps it is the same thing that happens to us when we enter the revolving front door of our swanky office buildings (remember those?). We enter as a human being: we emerge three seconds later as a stuffed shirt – stiff, guarded and in our business uniform, both inside and out.

And if there were a font called Business Uniform, that’s what most CVs are composed in. Instead of flowing sentences filled with originality and personality, we get strings of identikit self-description:

Highly qualified, knowledgeable, professional, seasoned, experienced, ambitious, energetic, enthusiastic…passionate

These words are the common currency of all bog-standard, undifferentiated CVs. But they obscures rather than reveals the person we are meeting.

Let’s start again, shall we?

Tear up your existing CV. It’s probably terrible. Write a new one. From scratch. After all, your circumstances have changed: you are more experienced than when your last version was written. You have different ambitions and priorities now. These must be reflected in your CV. Make no reference to online templates. Don’t even look at your previous version. You need to access the real you, the you that everyone wants to employ.

The golden rules of CV/ resumé writing

• Mirror, mirror, on the wall

  Let’s start with you. Chances are, in this economic climate, you may have taken a few knocks to your confidence. You may have been ‘re-sized’ or ‘downsized’ or ‘let go’. That’s ok. It is often good to be shaken out of comfort and habit, even though it never feels like that at the time. Try to stay focused on the fact that this is an opportunity in disguise (pretty heavily disguised, I grant you) and the chance to refocus on what you really want to do. Platitudinous? Nope. We’ve seen hundreds of people take the psychological and financial knock of being made redundant and end up in way better jobs, start new careers or re-prioritise their lives – including ourselves. If W.H Smith hadn’t made Tim redundant in 1982, for example, we wouldn’t have Waterstone’s bookstores.

  Alternatively, it may be that you just fancy a new direction, a bigger or a different role.

  Either way, what you need now is love. Not flaccid, ‘there-there’ tea-and- sympathy love, but real love – love of yourself and the useful love that helps you get back on the road. (It might even come dressed as tough love.)

  Your state of mind and attitude are both real issues. They determine your start point. Several of our resume-writers had lost their self-confidence. One said:

  Frankly, it is very challenging to write anything interesting about myself

  Another explained that the outplacement service she had been referred to ‘couldn’t make sense of my career’. This was a person who specialised in oncological research and has produced not one but two protocols adopted by the NHS as standard procedure for patient communications. The outplacement person who said this needs, well, outplacing.

  Often, we do not see ourselves as anything special. But you are probably one of the most needed people in the world today – certainly our oncological friend is. It is simply a question of finding that need and acknowledging it in yourself.

  Start by remembering that you are not selling your past. Which is why a CV must not be a comprehensive list of all the positions you have ever held. You are selling your potential. How you can be of use and value in the future. What you can offer your future employer and the world.

  Making sense of your life and work is a big deal. You need a really good, objective mirror in which to evaluate yourself. Most CVs fail to value all the personal assets, skills and qualities the author undoubtedly possesses. This is why people don’t make them shine. They bury the diamonds in a lot of verbose guff: for example, why bother listing all your O level/ GCSE results when you have a degree in data analytics from the LSE?

  If you can see yourself through the eyes of others who value you (in our case, the group we were working with), you will be able to see a very different you from the one you carry around in your head and see in the mirror every day. Ask people you trust and believe what they say when they say good, positive things they value in you. They probably see you more truly for who you are than you see yourself.

  Ask yourself ‘what do I really want? What do I really offer the world? What do I genuinely love doing?’ Let’s go from there, shall we? Don’t start by finding a job opening and filling your CV with all the jargon and clichés around that job that make you sound like every other candidate.

  Done all that? Now you need to grab the reader’s attention and stand out.

• Be the recruiter

  The people reading your CV want to do a good job. But they do not want to have to struggle to do that good job. They want to find the right people to interview. They want to throw as many of the thousands of CVs they receive in the trash. Why? At this stage of the process they are looking to exclude rather than include. Luckily for them, most CVs they receive make that job a cinch. Typo? Trash. Clichés? Trash. Generic boasts? Trash. Hyperbolic claims?

  I deliver superior performance in everything I do

  Trash. (Really? You’re good at everything? You’ve never failed? This kind of nonsense makes recruiters heave. Who wants to interview someone who has never failed? They’re either a deluded fool or a child.)

• Keep the main thing the main thing

  You have only seven seconds (maximum) to make the right impression. The job of your first line is to get the reader to want to read the second line. Which means you must focus on your main, key message. What is most important for you and about you? Here’s some examples – where we started and where we ended up with the group we helped.

  Starters:

  A Project Manager and team builder specialising in Healthcare effectiveness research and projects.

  A highly qualified economist and experienced risk manager with excellent knowledge of counterparty risk within the investment banking environment, with particular focus on capital markets.

  An executive leader with more than 8 years of experience in directing all aspects of marketing operations for multi-billion dollar organisations.

  The Forthwrite versions:

  I studied experimental psychology at Cambridge. My grandfather was a gypsy. I am not entirely normal.

  I love working with complex processes and diverse people: the more complex and diverse they are the better. I am an analytical academic – but with a heart.

  Parachute me into any market and I will survive, thrive and enjoy it. Think of me as ‘Spetsnaz’ for businesses needing a turnaround.

These opening lines tee up the reader to want to know more. The second line of the opening must deliver on this promise – it is the chance to substantiate the claim, to make it relevant to the position being applied for. But you will never get this far if your opening line sends the reader to sleep.

• P.E.E.L

Make your Point. Explain it (briefly). Give Evidence to substantiate your claim. Link your point to the main message.

This is a good acronym to use when structuring your CV. It keeps everything relevant and proven. Use a few killer numbers where you can. If the only digits on your CV are you mobile telephone number, you’re in trouble. Numbers are the language of business – you need to use them judiciously to prove the effect of what you achieved in terms of results where you have worked. Too many numbers will dilute the impact of the really impressive ones, so hit the heights.

• Format

  Make your CV easy to read and understand – people don’t read them for pleasure. Help them to navigate your story. Make sure the format reflects your personality and style. If you are applying for design jobs, your resumé needs to look beautiful and be inventive (without sacrificing ease of reading).

  Write sharply and well. A resumé is not a competition to write the longest sentence with the most subordinate clauses. Here’s an example of what we mean:

Overcome underperforming technician recruiting levels using new lead generation campaigns for recruiters which are critical for attracting quality candidates using digital media tactics, search, social media, mobile, and email channels.

All that is really being said here is ‘improved recruitment by using a mix of technologies cleverly’.

Get your CV out into the world

Our candidates are now out in the field searching for work. One – the one who built his first website at the age of eight – is on his second interview already. The others are on the road and we wish them all the luck in the world landing the job of their dreams. As if we needed reminding: everyone – absolutely everyone – has a story to tell. If you are on the job search trail, and you don’t know where to start, try thinking about the last project you did (at work or at home) that you loved doing. Write about it, from the heart. What you did, how you did it, what happened, who you did it with and what you loved about it. Somewhere in what you write is the start of your story and the opening line of your CV. If you enjoy writing it, we’ll sure as hell enjoy reading it. And that’s half the battle.

And finally, like Dean Martin, lay out everything you need to be able to perform the way you want to perform, to be able to write the resumé which shows you to the world as you wish the world to understand you. Then go out there and sing.

The Forthwrite playlist

Let’s have a look at the consummate pro in action, singing the recruiter’s anthem: Somewhere there’s a someone.

1. Photo credit: Terry O’Neill and Iconic Images