It is surprising to me that among all the steps required to get a job, most people put the least amount of effort in making their CVs stand out. I receive about a dozen CVs each week, and I open them for roughly 5-seconds each!

It is mind-boggling how many CVs big companies, that are 100X or 1000X bigger than mine, would be receiving each week, and still, people expect them to look at their CVs in detail.

Here’s the bottom line mindset of an employer when going through the pile of CVs:

“If the person is not smart enough to learn to write a great CV, he/she is not smart enough for the job”

In almost all cases, a CV that stands out wins over a CV of a person with higher qualifications but horrible to read.

When you are creating your CV, you have to think about the 2 stages:

Stage 1 – How to get your CV to stand out in the pile so it gets shortlisted into the 10% of the CVs that will be reviewed in detail.

This stage has to do with the aesthetics of your CV. What is the image it creates in the employer’s head in 5 seconds? Does it scream that the person who has created it must be really smart? Is it even beautiful to look at and soothing to skim through? When do you write your GPA and when you don’t?

Stage 2 – How to construct your CV and word it to make your personality, qualifications, and experiences convince the employers that if they do not call you for an interview, they will be missing out on a great candidate.

This stage has to do with how you present your information in your CV. What words you use? How do you make your experiences relevant? How do you construct sentences to give full context? What details you give?

This blog post will give you 3 Hacks To Standout in Stage 1.

I have developed a Full Online Video course in which I teach you in detail both Stage 1 and Stage 2, with examples and exact words to write.

You can access the full course here: Ultimate Resume Makeover

Why I Am Qualified Enough To Talk About CVs?

In the past 3 years, I have gone through somewhere between 1000-1500 CVs. These include both the Academic CVs for research jobs or those of PhD candidates and the CVs for the job market (both by fresh graduates with no work experience and by those who have been working for a few years).

In addition, I have also secured several high paying internships and job offers since 2012. These include internship offer from Unilever Asia Headquarters in Singapore (only 21 interns every year), and job offers / interviews from Microsoft, HSBC, VISA, Burger King Asia Headquarters, Centre for Innovative Cities, and about half a dozen start-ups in Australia & Singapore.

All these 3 Hacks are vetted by being on both sides of the process – an employer and an applicant.

3 Hacks To Make Your CV Standout

Hack # 1: Only The First Page Matters

If you read 100 answers regarding CV’s length on any forum on the internet or ask 100 people around you about how many pages your CV should be, you will always receive 50-50 answers. Half of the people will say that it must be 1 Page, while the rest half will say anything between 2-4 Pages.

I was sitting with two of my friends the other day. They are married to each other, and in the corporate world for the past 7-8 years. I was telling them that I’m writing this post on CV and my first hack is whether a CV should be 1 page or more than that. Almost instantly both of them responded back together – “It should be 1 Page” and “I think 2-3 Pages is optimum”. Then there was a pause… and laughter. All 3 of us realised that CV’s length is one of those topics that even the couples can’t agree on!

Today, I am going to give you a definite answer. Just follow this, and it’s not only going to make your CV stand out in the pile, but will also increase your confidence by taking the confusion out of your head.

No matter how many pages your CV is, if you can’t sell yourself within the first page, you are discarded.

More precisely, your second or third page won’t even be looked at if you haven’t qualified for the interview.

When the employers look at the CVs, they only look at the first page. If your first page convinces the employer that you are smart, qualified and suitable for the job, you get an interview call.

It’s only during the interview that the employer will look at your other pages, and ask questions if there’s anything relevant or interesting in there.

The mistake most applicants do is that they think that having more pages means that they have more experiences and skills to talk about. So they should definitely write at least 2 pages and spread their information on those 2 pages. That’s suicide!

I want you to have a different mindset from now on. Think like an employer. You have a hundred CVs in front of you. You need to quickly shortlist people who are highly qualified and have relevant work experiences. You won’t be turning to page 2, read through to the third paragraph, and try to find a qualification or a relevant work experience, right? You will be taking a look at the first page only.

So as an applicant, take whatever is important to you, summarize it, and put it on the first page.

Yes, you can still have a second page or even a third page, although not necessary, but know in your head that this extra information will only be looked at during the interview. These could be your volunteer experiences, student society’s experiences, or some projects you want to talk about.

Hack # 2: What Comes First: Education or Work Experience?

Now that you know that the first page is the only one that matters, you need to be asking yourself how the first half of the first page should look like?

Before I tell you what comes in here, I need to tell you what you should remove right away if it’s in your CV already.

Remove your passport picture (unless you are Fawad Khan or Priyanka Chopra). Remove your date of birth, address, sex, and every other information related to your biodata.

Basically, the top of your CV should only have 3 things: Your Name, Phone number, and Email address. That’s it.

Not even your Skype ID. Do you think the employer will randomly add you on Skype and call you? No. The employer will ALWAYS either email you or call you on your mobile. Every other piece of information in addition to these 3 pieces is irrelevant, unnecessary, and aesthetically unpleasing.

Once you are done with the header, you are now ready to fill the first half of your first page with either your education details or your work experience.

What comes first?

Your trump card.

Instead of holding your trump card to play it later in the game, you open your CV with your trump card. Your trump card is your biggest achievement. The one that a few other people can compare with.

For instance, if you have several Dean’s Lists, or graduated with a Gold Medal, or a Double Major, or a Perfect GPA, your education can come first.

If on the other hand, you did an exclusive internship at a Multinational giant, such as Facebook, Google, Unilever, Rolls Royce, IBM, Uber, Amazon, etc, then your internship section should come before education.

And lastly, if you are already at a full-time job and your current experience is relevant to the next job that you are applying for, then your Work Experience section comes first.

If you are thinking that you neither have good grades, nor an exclusive internship or work experience, then what do you do? The answer is that you choose whatever is YOUR biggest achievement among all your credentials. Maybe the company that you did an internship in isn’t a known brand, but your work scope was such that you have gained invaluable experience through it. Or maybe that your GPA isn’t good enough, but you wrote a paper that was published in a national or an international journal.

Give it a deep thought. What do you think is your achievement or qualification that you can present in a way that it looks like your trump card?

We will go into the details of how to craft your education, internship and work experiences in a way that they stand out from the other 99% of the people, even if your achievements aren’t outstanding at all, in the video program.

For now, let’s move on to the last hack.

Hack # 3: Your Name Is Your Brand

This is my personal favourite hack. And it is so because almost no one does it. It operates on the deeper level of human psychology.

Your name is your brand name. And like every great brand, you need to think of what is the name you should use on your CV.

No one said that you have to write your full name. Your CV is not a legal document.

Our minds are programmed to create a certain visual in our heads when we hear or read names. What’s the visual that comes to your head when you hear Mercedes? Something luxurious. What’s the visual that comes to your head when you hear Suzuki? Something cheap or inexpensive.

This is true for human names as well. What’s the visual that comes to your head when you hear Rothschild or Rockefeller? Even if you haven’t read their stories, you know these guys must be rich and influential.

There is one more reason you need to be thoughtful about your name on your CV. All of us and all the employers are subconsciously racist.

Being non-racist takes a conscious effort. And it is rightly encouraged at workplaces. But intuitively, our minds create a certain image of a person when we hear or read their names.

This is even more true when you are from South Asia, and applying for jobs in Australia (or any other western country). Since Australians are not accustomed to traditional Indian, Pakistani, or Sri Lankan names, you need to be mindful of what name you write on your CV.

The rule of thumb is that your name should not be more than 2 words long, and each part of the name should be pronounced easily with a maximum of 2 syllables.

Let me give you 2 examples to make it clear. One is from my male Pakistani friend, and the other from my female Indian friend… and both of them are going to kill me after this!

Name 1: Muhammad Mohsin Hassan

If you are applying for jobs in Australia (or any western country) this is really not the best name you should have, for obvious reasons.

So let’s make it 2 words: Mohsin Hassan

You see the imagery has changed already. Mohsin Hassan is a name that creates a totally different image than Muhammad in the name.

Although Mohsin Hassan is perfectly fine, you can further modify it to: Moh Hassan

Moh Hassan sounds like a very international name and it doesn’t even give the imagery of being from South Asia.

Either of the 2 name suggestions above is fine. Depends on how ‘adventurous’ you want to be with branding.

Name 2: Bhavana Balakrishnan

It’s a beautiful Indian name, but I can bet $100 that you can randomly select 10 Australians, and not even a single one of them will be able to pronounce it properly.

So what do we do? We can play with the surname and shorten it up to just 1 syllable.

~~Bala~~krish~~nan~~ = Krish

The full name becomes: Bhavana Krish

You can see now that Bhavana Krish has a very different brand image than that of Bhavana Balakrishnan.

What might look like a small thing to you is being practised at the top-level in every industry. Brad Pitt’s legal name is William Bradley Pitt. And Johnny Depp’s actual name is John Christopher Depp II. There isn’t even a Johnny in there!

Our names are the biggest brands we will be carrying all our lives. It pays to pay some attention to it.

—

In the post above, I have given only 3 Hacks to make your CV stand out, and it’s already more than 2000 words! This isn’t even 20% of what I cover in the full video program: Ultimate Resume Makeover

In it, I teach more hacks for Stage 1, but more importantly, we go into the details of Stage 2, that actually gets you the interview call.

Here’s the summary of both the stages again:

Stage 1 – How to get your CV to stand out in the pile so it gets shortlisted into the 10% of the CVs that will be reviewed in detail.

This program if for you:

Even if you don’t have a lot of work experience
Even if you are still in 3rd or 4th year of university
Even if you don’t have accomplishments worth mentioning

Here’s the link to the full online course again: Ultimate Resume Makeover