A CV is a CV, right? Unfortunately not. Your CV is there to sell your skills. You’ll need to adapt it, both to specific jobs, and to specific audiences.

If you’re looking for work in the current market, you will probably be marketing your CV to three very distinct audiences: direct employers (eg. Banks, fund managers, or insurance companies); recruitment firms; and job boards.

Each have different criteria for judging and storing CVs. If you are aware of this before you begin, it will benefit you enormously in your job search.

Agencies

Due to their nature, the vast majority of agencies will collect your CV and place it into a database and it is from this database that you will be contacted regarding suitable jobs. The issue with these databases is that they are key word biased: they will rank individual CV’s based upon the frequency of a particular word or phrase.

If, therefore, you wish to find a job in institutional equity sales, you are advised to mention this as frequently as possible in your CV. This will ensure your details are retrieved by recruiters and researchers looking for institutional equities sales candidates.

Once your CV has been retrieved from the database and you have been identified as a possible candidate, it will also help if you have developed a good working relationship with the recruiter so that you’re given the chance to adapt it for the client and role in question.

Direct employers

Employers like banks usually want very specific details from an applicant. If you’re applying to an employer directly, you will therefore really need to understand both the roles and the needs of the organisation and fashion your CV appropriately.

Where possible, it will help if you contact the employer and discuss the role. This will help you understand how to stand out and allow you emphasise the right elements of your CV.

Online job boards

Preparing a general CV for a job board is not dissimilar to preparing a general CV for a recruitment firm. Bear in mind that recruiters and employers using such boards will usually only pay for a certain number of views. You therefore need to do everything you can to ensure you feature in search results. This includes, making sure your CV has a good and relevant title - don’t use “Fred’s CV,” use, “Experienced FX trader with PHD” for example to showcase your skills.

Equally, keywords in the body of your CV will also increase the likelihood of it appearing in search results on job boards. Make sure you provide as much information as you can on things like how many languages you speak, how much experience you have and in which areas, and where you’re looking to work.

Finally, it will help if you update the CV you load onto job boards. Recruiters searching boards for CVs are usually given the option to look only at CVs uploaded in the last weeks or months. If your CV has been up for longer than that, it may get filtered out.

In essence developing a CV is a subtle art that has communication at its heart.

Good luck!

Ray Baptiste

www.InterviewMaster.co.uk