Successful advertising executive (49) seeks position cleaning rooms and cooking breakfasts
It was the hardest CV I'd ever had to write. It turned out to be the best
Chalet maids. David is the one on the right
Pippa’s first question was to the point.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
She clutched my CV in her hand.
‘We’ve been debating upstairs whether this is a wind-up or if you’re a spy – one of our competitors. So, which is it?’
Pippa was managing partner in a ski firm, who, until COVID and Brexit dealt them two knockout punches, provided brilliant holidays in the French Alps at their lovely chalets.
I was a 50-year-old male applying for a job as a chalet maid.
The most important thing about this story is that I had made it into the interview room in the first place. What had got me there?
My CV. I’d had a great career in advertising. I was doing well as a consultant. But I wanted to take a sabbatical and work in the mountains for a season, skiing. I had no direct experience, couldn’t cook, spoke bar-standard French and I certainly wasn’t out of central casting for a job as a seasonnaire. Yet, here I was, about to be interviewed by the boss of the company herself. How did my CV pull that off?
Most people haven’t had to write a CV for years. We lose the knack.
It’s a knack lots of us now have to reacquire – fast.
UK unemployment is expected to reach 2.6 million by the middle of 2021, affecting 7.5% of the population. We are in a world where, even before the pandemic, an average of 250 candidates apply for every corporate job. Only 3% get an interview.
In the past few months, I have helped a data scientist, a salesman, a linguist, a travel consultant, a vet, an artist and seven graduates write their resumes. I’ve also been on the interview panel for the graduate programme of a big communications company. I am often asked by clients to cast an eye over candidates for board level positions.
And you know what? Most candidates don’t have a clue.
They turn to internet templates and a string of cliches they think potential employers want to read. They struggle to tell their work/life story. They make the first mistake all unsuccessful writers make: they don’t make their words relevant to the poor sod who has to read them.
If you want to test your CV out, read it out loud, claim by claim, and keep asking yourself so what? at the end of each sentence. That’s just about the hardest test any piece of writing needs to pass. It’s a test few CV writers even attempt.
Organisations make their decision to hire you based on your interview – not on your CV or resume. Your CV has only one job: to get you that interview. You need to sound interesting enough to be worth the bother of meeting.
In early March this year, Linked In published a list of the top 15 jobs ‘on the rise’. It contains some predictable occupations for these times (top of the list are frontline e-commerce workers and delivery drivers – 75% of whom now have a Bachelor’s degree or higher qualification), AI practitioners, mental health specialists and user-experience experts.
The survey also contains some positive signs that organisations are looking to grow again and that the market is optimistic: the openings for business development and sales professionals, data scientists and loan and mortgage experts point to a positive economic perspective.
Yes, the market will be crowded with applicants. But most of the competition will be submitting humdrum CVs, devoid of differentiation or personality. Don’t be one of them. It’s estimated that recruiters scan CVs from between 6 and 7.3 seconds each – if at all. A bit of effort expended on crafting an original CV will still get you to the top of the pile.
A CV must make an impact from the first line, just as a novel must hook in the reader immediately. So spend effort and time crafting that opening. Don’t waste the valuable few seconds you have on hygiene factors – leave them for later – or on platitudes. And please don’t say it has been your lifelong ambition to work for such a far-seeing firm as Joffings of Gillingham, Tyre Makers To The Gentry, or that you dream of spending 40 years in carpets. It’s not credible, it is insincere – and it will be spotted.
Instead, be disarmingly yourself. Your resume is your shop window, your advertisement. Think Fortnum & Mason at Christmas, a beautiful story, well told in every window. Don’t think Debenhams Summer Sale – look what happened to them.
A beautiful story: Fortnum and Mason’s Christmas window
How to put the vitality into your curriculum vitae
Here’s some advice I gave to a brilliant ex-US Marine and part-time lecturer on data at a Midwestern University. His resume signally failed to make his experience and exceptional ability sound extraordinary. I wrote:
At the moment, your resume is fully devoted to your life as a data scientist in the past 10 years – your skills and knowledge in this field. However, your life experience, your skills are much broader, your personality is much more complex and interesting. You have much more to offer to a company – your managerial and leadership skills, your passion, your wisdom, your background, etc. So I would advise you to include them too. It’ll make a much more compelling read.
A CV is not a list. Nor is it a string of cliches lifted from a business manual which tick imaginary boxes that some putative employer wants to hear (team player, leadership qualities, innovative thinker). Nor is it a comprehensive list of the job descriptions you have had over the last two decades, including the bar tender position you held one summer in the university holidays.
It is an opportunity to stand out and show what difference you made to current and past employers’ results.
A CV is you on the page: in Latin, it means ‘course of life’ – the path your life has taken. It’s a history of choices driven by your personality, your attitude, your uniqueness.
CVs should be long enough to give a favourable impression and short enough to make the reader want to know more. Here’s the opening I put on my CV applying for the ski chalet job:
Ok. I’m 49. I’m older than your company’s average guest, let alone the crew. Why would I want to do a season cleaning, scrubbing and cooking in the mountains?
I first read about you in The Guardian a few years ago and thought that once the time was right, I wanted to work for a company that values maturity and experience, as well as creativity and enthusiasm, and puts those attributes to work. And as I love adventure, skiing, food and getting to know new people – now that my children are off to university, I can combine all of these in one job.
My career has always revolved around working with people and building relationships with colleagues and clients that last. I love meeting new people and love being part of a crew that wants to do great things and have fun doing them. I hope that running my own company proves I am a grafter and a problem solver and that I would bring something extra to your team: boundless energy, friendliness, self-motivation, stamina, adaptability (I can turn my hand to most things). You’ll get someone who is quick-thinking, quick-acting, super-organised, thoughtful, self-confident and able to hold a conversation with just about anyone.
I love good food and am investing in a two-week chalet cookery course to get my skills to an even better level, and I’m training to be a qualified ski instructor – adding relevant new practical skills to those I already have. I have also enjoyed many chalet holidays and believe I understand and can deliver what guests with the highest expectations want and need from the people looking after them.
Over to you
At Forthwrite, we can help. We run courses on CV/ resumé writing which will help make you stand out from everyone else. Which is just what’s needed right now. Contact us via our website forthwrite.co.uk and check out what other people have said about the courses.
I got the job at the ski company. I had the best winter of my life. Pippa gave me a chance and even promoted me to Resort Manager in Meribel the year after. But that, as they say, is another story.
Kean in Morzine, demonstrating one way to engage and bond with clients
The birth of a new saying
Last week, we were privileged to witness the first outing for a sentence that will go down in history – and straight into the books of quotations.
In their response to Meghan Markle’s allegations about her treatment during her short life as a royal, Buckingham Palace said ‘some recollections may vary’.
That line already has classic status. Yesterday, the Prime Minister’s controversial former advisor, Dominic Cummings, appeared before a House of Commons hearing where he appeared to take credit for the UK’s successful vaccination roll-out. One furious source told the Politico website that in reality Cummings thought the search for a vaccine was ‘a distraction’. A second, more measured, said of Cummings’ vaccine testimony – you’ve got it : ‘some recollections may vary’.
The words work because they are at once understated, polite – and deadly. All very British.
Cummings: opinions vary
Let’s end with Steve Jobs on how to make sense of your life and career
You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.