The competitive edge in job hunting

The competitive edge: advice to developers and designers from a tech recruiter No matter where you are applying – to a recruitment agency or directly to a company - someone, somewhere is screening your resume. The big question is how to make your CV really showcase your achievements in the best light? How to make your CV stand out from the crowd? How to make an impact, ensuring you get that all important phone call? One thing that I used to do in my time as a recruiter, did when I was job hunting myself, and advise candidates to do now is to include your cover letter in the same document as your CV. When the documents are separate and come through an applicant tracking system, the first person in the process is usually the only one who sees it. This means that you might have the best cover letter in the world, but there is no guarantee of your future manager ever reading it! Keep it in the same document as your CV as a kind of front-page, and everyone in the hiring process will get to read it. (Check out my blog post on the importance of CVs here). Another tip is to keep your CV as short as possible. It is very tempting to include details of every single project you have worked on, but reams of pages are a turn off to anyone. Imagine you had to read two job adverts– if both had similar information but one was two pages and one was six pages, which would you prefer to read? If you are a designer or developer, one of the main things I would advise is to include links to the work you have done in your CV. The amount of developers and designers who apply to my jobs who haven’t included any of their previous work is astonishing! Show off what you have done! Be proud of your achievements! Don’t feel like you shouldn’t include something just because it isn’t perfect – CVs that have portfolios or links attached are so much more engaging than ones that don’t. We are predominantly visual creatures, after all. If you have been working on internal systems/projects and don’t have any external links that you can include on your CV – add a link to your Github, Stackoverflow, Flickr or Behance profiles instead. Any online presence that showcases you, your talents and - just as importantly - your personality, will help improve your response rates massively. Finally, once you have sent over your amazing CV + cover letter, and haven’t heard anything back – why not reach out to the recruiter via LinkedIn or Twitter? Social recruiting is becoming more and more widespread, and any recruiter worth their salt is online. It’s easy to find out who your CV would have been sent to – just search LinkedIn for any of the following "recruiter" OR " HR" OR “technical recruiter” OR “IT recruiter” OR “talent acquisition specialist” AND [the company name], and they will come up in the search results! It doesn’t take two minutes to send a quick message introducing yourself and asking if they have received your application – but it can make you stand out from potentially hundreds of other candidates. Do you have any hints and tips that have helped you in your job searches? Please share them below!

Laura Summerfield is a Manchester based technology recruiter/music lover/book geek. In her spare time she likes eating vegan food, making cushions, playing civ, and walking her two dogs, Manny and Ralph. You can find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

#CVtips #Jobsearchtips