Digital Age CVs

Writing Your CV for the Digital World

Authored by Victoria Williams, Liftstream Ltd - April 10th 2010

Writing a CV (curriculum vitae) is a task that many of us don’t enjoy. During our daily work we churn out acres of emails, reports, presentations and articles in an attempt to communicate our findings and opinions, but somehow writing about ourselves is a more challenging proposition. We often fail to maintain our CV in working order so it is ready for distribution at a moments notice, while sitting in front of a computer screen staring directly into our past seems to almost guarantee that every self-promoting, experience reflecting synapse shuts down faster than .

There are many guides and books dedicated to writing CVs that offer practical advice about structure, format, font and language, so I do not intend to cover these particular points. What I am interested in briefly covering is how you must begin to think of your CV in the modern context.

Job searching has changed dramatically. In years gone by we used to draft a compelling covering letter, print it on best-paper and send it with an immaculate copy of the CV so that it landed on the hiring manager’s desk looking like a thing of beauty and read like a well versed literary piece. This was all designed to stand out from the crowd, to grab the reader’s attention and to pull them into your story, so they could visualise the value you could bring to their team or firm.

And those principles are current now, only different in their practical application. People are no longer deciding your future on the quality of corrugated paper or embossed lettering, for we live in a digital age. CVs are rarely filed away in lever arch files according to distinct skill sets where they can be retrieved every time we need to hire again. Instead, we digitally organise, where your CV and your personal profile is something that must be accessible to those with the retrieval skills to find it in the banks of digital information that populate global internal recruitment databases. Or, it sits out there on the internet, on job boards, CV databases, blogs, homepages, social networking profiles like Linked-In or ZoomInfo. And the truth is your CV is no different from other internet-based information, it is indexed and retrieved according to relevance.

In the past 20 years we have seen astounding creativity in job titles. They have ranged from the ambiguous, the grandiose, the ridiculous and the obscure. Yet, in your industry, whatever it might be, there will be common descriptions applied to nearly every job that is consistent across the sector. When people are seeking you out for employment, they will apply these common expressions to identify and narrow their field of search, so littering your CV with non-descript job titles or irrelevant role descriptions will not harvest your CV in many of the searches for which your skills and experience are relevant. Likewise, if you operate as a consultant, it is perhaps astute to support this independent status with clear reference of your experience, such as Supply Chain Consultant, rather than the tendency to elevate one’s position to CEO or Founder of ‘YourConsultant Ltd’, or whichever company you have founded to go about your business.

Relevance and keywords, searchable tags and common expressions are critical in your CV if you wish to maximise your chances of being recalled in recruitment databases. If you have expertise in the field of cancer, then detailing this in your CV with keywords like oncology or haematology will throw you up in related searches. Even extending this further to detail particular areas of cancer might help locate you for the very niche disciplines like Breast Cancer or Prostate Cancer. If you have specific regional expertise, such as China, India or Emerging Markets, then make sure you say so, it maybe you’ll not get another chance to do so. If you consider yourself to be an expert and you want a job in translational medicine, then lay out the detail in your CV, so you appear in the search as recruiters and HR refine their search terms to retrieve suitable candidates.

So it is time to think intuitively about how CV searching works in the modern era. Of course the discerning eye can identify and distinguish experience, however, more often than not your CV is subject to electronic retrieval and for this you must be savvy to the world of keywords and internet searching. If you’re not getting the calls about jobs or you’re perhaps getting calls about the wrong jobs, it might just be that your CV is not internet or technology friendly, so consider this when drafting your personal masterpiece.


Organisation Relationships Innovation Growth Environment Recruitment Advertising Campaign Carbon Footprints Balance of Power Recruiting Diversity Digital Age CVs Clustered Talent Core Skills Workplace Diversity 2010 Jobs Celgene	Digital Age CVs Writing Your CV for the Digital World Authored by Victoria Williams, Liftstream Ltd - April 10th 2010 Writing a CV (curriculum vitae) is a task that many of us don’t enjoy. During our daily work we churn out acres of emails, reports, presentations and articles in an attempt to communicate our findings and opinions, but somehow writing about ourselves is a more challenging proposition. We often fail to maintain our CV in working order so it is ready for distribution at a moments notice, while sitting in front of a computer screen staring directly into our past seems to almost guarantee that every self-promoting, experience reflecting synapse shuts down faster than . There are many guides and books dedicated to writing CVs that offer practical advice about structure, format, font and language, so I do not intend to cover these particular points. What I am interested in briefly covering is how you must begin to think of your CV in the modern context. Job searching has changed dramatically. In years gone by we used to draft a compelling covering letter, print it on best-paper and send it with an immaculate copy of the CV so that it landed on the hiring manager’s desk looking like a thing of beauty and read like a well versed literary piece. This was all designed to stand out from the crowd, to grab the reader’s attention and to pull them into your story, so they could visualise the value you could bring to their team or firm. And those principles are current now, only different in their practical application. People are no longer deciding your future on the quality of corrugated paper or embossed lettering, for we live in a digital age. CVs are rarely filed away in lever arch files according to distinct skill sets where they can be retrieved every time we need to hire again. Instead, we digitally organise, where your CV and your personal profile is something that must be accessible to those with the retrieval skills to find it in the banks of digital information that populate global internal recruitment databases. Or, it sits out there on the internet, on job boards, CV databases, blogs, homepages, social networking profiles like Linked-In or ZoomInfo. And the truth is your CV is no different from other internet-based information, it is indexed and retrieved according to relevance. In the past 20 years we have seen astounding creativity in job titles. They have ranged from the ambiguous, the grandiose, the ridiculous and the obscure. Yet, in your industry, whatever it might be, there will be common descriptions applied to nearly every job that is consistent across the sector. When people are seeking you out for employment, they will apply these common expressions to identify and narrow their field of search, so littering your CV with non-descript job titles or irrelevant role descriptions will not harvest your CV in many of the searches for which your skills and experience are relevant. Likewise, if you operate as a consultant, it is perhaps astute to support this independent status with clear reference of your experience, such as Supply Chain Consultant, rather than the tendency to elevate one’s position to CEO or Founder of ‘YourConsultant Ltd’, or whichever company you have founded to go about your business. Relevance and keywords, searchable tags and common expressions are critical in your CV if you wish to maximise your chances of being recalled in recruitment databases. If you have expertise in the field of cancer, then detailing this in your CV with keywords like oncology or haematology will throw you up in related searches. Even extending this further to detail particular areas of cancer might help locate you for the very niche disciplines like Breast Cancer or Prostate Cancer. If you have specific regional expertise, such as China, India or Emerging Markets, then make sure you say so, it maybe you’ll not get another chance to do so. If you consider yourself to be an expert and you want a job in translational medicine, then lay out the detail in your CV, so you appear in the search as recruiters and HR refine their search terms to retrieve suitable candidates. So it is time to think intuitively about how CV searching works in the modern era. Of course the discerning eye can identify and distinguish experience, however, more often than not your CV is subject to electronic retrieval and for this you must be savvy to the world of keywords and internet searching. If you’re not getting the calls about jobs or you’re perhaps getting calls about the wrong jobs, it might just be that your CV is not internet or technology friendly, so consider this when drafting your personal masterpiece.
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