04 May 2023
We all want to make sure our CV sells us in the right way to the recruiters who are considering whether to hire us, so we need to make sure the essential skills we have are described using the correct level of detail.
Writing a CV can be a difficult skill to get right and there are many ways to mess up and make costly mistakes that can deny us the chance at being interviewed for jobs that we really want. It is important to take care when writing a CV and a covering letter to ensure that we include as much relevant information as we possibly can and that we signpost recruiters to our most valuable skills.
You can include your skills in your CV in various ways, but you need to take the time to get this right. Here are the choices to help you decide which is the best for you:
1. Introductory Paragraph Naming Your Skills
Sometimes this is the best option if you have many skills to write about in your CV. Simply setting them out at the start of your CV lets recruiters know about the skills you claim to have. However, you must back this up within the detail of your CV, i.e. the career history section, so that recruiters can see the evidence of your skill in relation to specific work you have undertaken.
There are pros and cons to every approach, and if you feel like you have too many skills to write three or four lines about individually, this can be the way to set out what they are in a way that is sure to catch the eye of the recruiters.
Writing a CV can be hard and talking about your skills can feel like boasting, but it really isn’t. When people feel like that though, there is a chance that they undersell themselves and don’t include all of the relevant skills that they possess. Everyone who ever wrote a CV or applied for a job had to go through this process, and it is perfectly normal, even though it can sometimes feel like it is very challenging.
This option is great if you don't have much space to spare on your CV (bearing in mind you need to try to keep it to around 2, or an absolute maximum of 3 A4 pages). It allows you to include the relevant information in a way that saves space while still capturing the interest of the reader and ensuring that they see the most important information about your skills.
2. Outline your Skills Individually
This option enables you to name each of your skills in a small header in a separate skills section at the start of your CV, and then to explain each of them with the detail of how and where you have demonstrated them within 3 or 4 lines at most for each skill. Providing this information up front in your CV helps recruiters see what you are capable of at a glance.
This summary version allows you to lay out the skills that the recruiter is looking for and allows you to talk about your areas of strength easily in a well-structured way. This is helpful when the skills have come from your outside interests rather than from working environments, so there is no need to relate them back to job roles that you have held.
This option is perfect where you have accumulated some fantastic skills, but you can't necessarily cover them in the descriptions of your most recent roles or explain where these skills have been developed outside of work, e.g. in a personal capacity, where it would not be appropriate to include the activity in another section of your CV.
3. Keeping Your Skills Within the Career History
Many candidates choose not to have a separate skills section within their CV, but instead rely on the job detail to cover the relevant skills.
Each of the different options has different advantages and disadvantages and this way presents the disadvantage of not having your skills front and centre at the start of the document. That isn’t to say that you will necessarily be disadvantaged by this but it relies on the recruiters to do the heavy lifting in terms of reading the job detail information in order to identify individual skills that they are looking for.
Again, there is nothing wrong with this approach, however, if you are going to use this method, please ensure:
If you need help with your CV, we offer a CV review and creation service where we use our expertise in this area to design a CV that will appeal to recruiters and should help you win more interviews for the jobs you want to work in.
Feel free to get in touch even if you would just like a quick, free chat about your CV. We will be happy to hear from you and will do what we can to assist. We can be reached on 01772 633854 or hello@ourbob.com
