I recently posted to offer out CV advice and was quite overwhelmed with the response. The feedback I was giving was pretty much the same for most of the people I spoke with, so I decided it would be helpful to put something in writing for everyone to take a look at. Now is a great time to invest in updating your CV to ensure you stand out from the crowd.

It’s actually very straight forward, there’s only a few points to make, but all important:

Keep it simple 

Most employers do not have time to read an entire CV, they will be skim reading to pick out the most relevant information, so you need to give bite size chunks and keywords. Using bullet points is the best way to do this. There is no rule on how many pages to use, but I would suggest between 2-3. If you have 10+ years of experience then of course you may need more, but as long as it’s focused on relevant info, anything pre ecom/digital doesn’t need long explanations. 

I would also advise that the CV flows easily down the page – when you start laying it out in columns or trying to make it super creative to stand out, it can become difficult to follow and key details could be missed. This does not mean that you can’t add some colour or other ways to make it look pretty – you can still stamp your personality in.

Your bio

This is where you can give a good intro on yourself, your motivations and personality traits. It is important to tailor this to the role that you are applying to, following the job description to highlight some relevant skills. This doesn’t need to be very long, but should be a powerful elevator pitch on why you are the best person for the job.

Achievements

In my opinion, this is the most important thing you can have in your CV. Given that ecommerce and digital marketing roles are essentially about making money, proving that you have done this is your main selling point. Rather than just list out your job duties, quantify this with results. Have you increased ROI? Have you increased revenue YOY? Have you improved conversion? Have you implemented something new that had a positive impact? What projects have you worked on? How did they perform? You have so many opportunities to sell yourself, make sure you use them. These can be included under each particular role or could be a separate section after your bio at the top.

Key Skills

I think this section gets overlooked quite often. I either don’t see it at all or it’s at the bottom of the page. This is actually a good opportunity to list out the tools, platforms and technology you are familiar with. If a brand is working on Magento for example, being able to see that in your CV early on is an easy tick on experience. Many brands will have a requirement for someone who understand their tech as it’s a much quicker on boarding process. I would suggest having this at the top also, before you get into each of your roles (and this could go in columns across the page to save space, as it will be easy to skim across).

That’s really it, nothing crazy or unusual. Just telling the story of how amazing you are at your job 😊. If you want to have a chat about any of this let me know. You can send your CV over to me to take a look on jwatson@welovesalt.com

Written by Jade Watson, Managing Consultant, Salt