CVs and resumes

A CVs purpose is to advance you to the next stage of any recruitment process. It does this by showing that you have the skills to do the job/programme of study. A good CV will:

• Be tailored to the opportunity
• Be easy for the reader to find the skills they need to see
• Provide evidence of how skills are gained 
• Be consistent in terms of its layout
• Fill one or two whole pages
• Have no grammar or spelling errors

To create a tailored CV there are three main stages:

1. Analyse what the recruiter needs to see from you. Our reading advertisements webpage can help with this.
2. Match the skills you have to the opportunity you are applying to. Our knowing your skills webpage can help with this.
3. Create a CV that shows that you have the skills that the recruiter is asking for. The remainder of this webpage and examples within the CV, Cover Letter and Personal Statements guide can help with this.

The structure of you CV needs to make it easy for the recruiter to find your most relevant skills and experiences for the opportunity you are applying for. When reading a document quickly, people will look for patterns so your structure needs to be consistent and have clear sections and headings. The CVs, Cover Letters, and Personal Statements guide has many examples to help you choose a structure that will work for you. As a CV must be tailored to each opportunity, often headings and skills change to fit with what recruiters need to see.

CVs for graduate roles generally have these sections:

• Name and contact details – as a header to your CV
• Personal profile – optional but should be included if you are applying for larger firms that may use AI in their recruitment processes. Make this short, evidenced based and use it to highlight your most relevant experience to the opportunity. See the CVs, Cover Letters, and Personal Statements guide for examples.
• Education – lists of modules often don’t mean a lot to recruiters so consider using bullet points to highlight skills you have gained. You can include projects, labs, workshops etc. that you have been involved also.
• Experience – this section usually includes different titles to help organise your experiences so the recruiter can easily find the most relevant information. For example if you are applying for research opportunities, you may want to use Research Experience as a title. Often, parts of your degree are the most relevant experience you have to the opportunity so you could include projects, lab/workshop experience and practical experiences here also. Other common titles in the experience section are: Leadership experience, Work experience, Laboratory experience, Teaching experience, Extra Curricular activities, Engineering experience. Visit the key skills tab for more information on what to include under these titles.
• Skills – this section can be a simple list of the technical skills you have like computing skills, languages, lab or workshop skills. Skills that can be tested easily. Transferable skills such as communication, teamworking and organisation shouldn’t be listed here as they need evidence attached to them to prove that you can do them.
• Interests and Achievements – this section could be a list or it could be expanded to show extra skills that you have.
  If you are applying for opportunities in different countries, GoinGlobal can help you to understand if there is a different structure you need to use for you CV.

If you have a disability and would like to learn more about this within the recruitment process, visit our equality, diversity and inclusion webpages.

Within each of the sections explained in the structure tab, you will include the skills that you have gained from your experiences. Again you want to make the skills required by the recruiter as easy as possible for them to find so using structure and patterns can help. Writing long paragraphs makes it hard to find skills so bullet points are useful. For example:

• Collaborated with a team of 4 peers to create a prototype bot to assist with washing up
  The skill is collaborating and this is stated right at the start of the bullet point. The evidence is that you worked in a team of 4 to create a bot which forms the rest of the bullet point. The recruiter can easily see the skill and even if they don’t need you to create bots in their opportunity, they can shortlist you for stating what you’ve learnt from the experience.

You could also use this experience to highlight a different skill. For example:

• Created a bot to assist with washing up using Python and wrote a 2000 word report. The main skill is creating and the evidence again, is the bot however you go on to mention other skills including Python and report writing. Bullet points also make it easier for you to adapt your CV to meet different skills required by recruiters.

For example, if the skill you needed to highlight was report writing:

• Wrote a 2000 word report on a bot created in Python to assist with washing up

Or if the skill was Python coding e.g.

• Used Python to create a bot to assist with washing up and wrote a 2000-word report
  Develop a CV using this pattern when creating bullet points to show a recruiter that you match the skills they have within their advertisement. To help you think about what skills you’ve gained from the experiences you’ve had, visit our know your skills webpage.

Useful key words to use

Active language will sound much better than passive language. Here are some good words you could use to start the bullet points on your CV:

Problem solving - analysed, diagnosed, reduced, increased, simplified, evaluated, synthesised, tackled, investigated, reviewed, identified, refined, streamlined, examined, reorganised, solved

Organising and planning - distributed, reorganised, arranged, restructured, budgeted, verified, scheduled, computed, planned, produced

Leadership - created, formulated, designed, established, introduced, devised, started, developed, set up, launched, initiated, enabled

Attention to  detail - classified, differentiated, investigated, determined, experimented, equated, searched, developed, surveyed, examined, indexed, compiled, catalogued

Achievement - accelerated, accomplished, achieved, carried out, completed, improved, delivered, enhanced, finished, negotiated, obtained, produced, secured, increased, doubled, implemented

Communication - advised, participated, chaired meeting, wrote, instructed, demonstrated, edited, presented, discussed, promoted, persuaded, recommended

Managing - organised, implemented, established, produced, initiated, attained, maintained

Taking initiative - created, formulated, designed, established, introduced, devised, started, developed, set up, launched, initiated, enabled

Like any other CV you produce, a CV for a PhD, postdoc or higher academic post needs to be tailored to the opportunities. Academic CVs however do have a different format as they focus more on your publications, conferences spoken at, grants awarded and achievements along side your research, teaching and administration experiences.

Academic CVs can also be longer, although if you are at an early stage of your career you will try to want to keep the document to two pages still. This means the biggest challenge is arranging the titles within your CV to allow the reader to find the most relevant experiences easily.

The first step to writing an academic CV is the same as how you write any CV, analyse the opportunity advertisement. Our webpage on reading advertisements can help. There are example CVs in the CVs, Cover Letters, and Personal Statements.

For further examples and ideas of how to structure your academic CV, speak to your supervisor or any academic or visit the:

• Academic CV section of the Vitae website for researchers
• Getting an Academic Job section of the Prospects website
• GoinGlobal website for writing CVs for roles outside of the UK

A part-time job can help you develop valuable skills and earn money. Flexible part-time jobs like tutoring, retail, or administration also offer networking opportunities and customer service experience, which are important for many graduate roles. To find out more about part-time work and where you can look for these jobs, visit our part-time working page.

As with any CV you write, a CV for a part-time job must match the skills required to do that role. This often means the CV will have a different focus than traditional graduate level roles as what you are learning in your degree may be less relevant. Would you need to use knowledge that you have gained in a laboratory while you are serving customers at a restaurant? Probably not, so you need to consider other skills you have gained within that laboratory work that could be relevant like team working, problem solving or following health and safety protocols.

Common skills required often include customer service, team working (with a range of different people), money handling, negotiation and adaptability. Be sure to analyse the job advertisement or use you common sense to identify appropriate skills to include.

Here is an example of how Elena, a MEng Electrical and Electronic Engineering has adapted her CV for part-time work. Elena is part of the Animated Inclusive Personae project and to find out more about her and meet other personae visit the AIP website.

The role of AI within the recruitment process is evolving as quickly as the AI itself and it is very rare that an organisation will tell you exactly how it uses AI within their unique process. Generally, universities recruiting for masters, PhD or staff level roles are not using AI within their recruitment processes.

The most frequently used form of AI use however is Application Tracking Systems (ATS) which is often used by large multi-national organisations that receive hundreds of applications. These systems read a CV, looking for the same skills and key words from the criteria in the job description as a human recruiter would do.

This quicker process results in all CVs being sent in a report to the recruitment team, listing them from 100% match to the job description to 0% match. As these teams are always busy, they only tend to read the top scoring CVs and will have an internal threshold that they set for that recruitment cycle. For example, they may decide not to read any applications that score less than 70%

When creating CVs here are some things to consider if you think the opportunity you are applying for will use AI in any way.

• AI systems are not sophisticated and have difficulty reading pictures, graphics or information listed in columns. Simple layouts that use the whole page often score better.
• Avoid the use of graphics to demonstrate skill proficiency as your 5 out of 5 may be different to someone else’s definition of 5 out of 5 in that skill
• Include a personal profile in your CV to ensure your CV registers as complete with the ATS system