Monday, September 26, 2005

What Uncle Bogus said about my CV

From a brief read of the CV, I'd deduce the following about Hannah: -

She has confidence problems.
She rarely talks about her own achievements:

- She does not go into detail about her academic qualifications;
- She describes her professional work in terms of teams, not in terms of her own merits and her own contribution to the teams.
- She claims to be a competent user of Office, but relies on Word templates.
- She has SQL experience, but does not hype this up (do you have *any* idea how valuable this is? For example, a qualified accountant with good SQL skills can earn £30K more than an accountant without SQL - I've looked through the job listings at Hot Lizard). So, what level of SQL experience does she have? Is this something she's vaguely heard about and just added it in as a buzzword? This is not clear.
- She has issues with clear communication skills
- if I gave her an interview, I'd dearly love to know why her CV doesn't remotely describe her skills and experience accurately
- she's much better than she's letting on.

In fact, this doesn't really tell me much about Hannah at all. It tells me about the companies she's worked for and the teams she's worked in, but what about her? She claims to have Office experience but the layout of this document belies that; plus, everyone has Office experience these days. She has excellent communication skills; this is backed up by a degree in English from a good university, but what grade did she get? Practiced in consultancy? Her employment history should give solid examples of this (albeit in bullet-point form; just a brief mention of it in a single bullet point about *her*, not her team, would back up this statement). Experienced team leader - again, no mention of this in her employment history! SQL? Where has she used this? Why? Flexibility with different working environments - no mention of this *again*! She needs to explicitly state that she has travelled around the country to dozens of colleges, working with their teams and doing whatever it is she does - this demonstrates teamwork, communication skills, commitment (you'd have to be committed to stay away from home so much), etc.

If she could get to an interview, I don't think she's have any trouble at all getting the job that she wants - she's talkative, intelligent, has plenty of experience and is beautiful (which is always a bonus). Based on this CV, though, I wouldn't give her that opportunity, because it just doesn't tell me anything about her.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

who is uncle bodus?