How to Target Your CV Towards a Job

In today’s job market, it’s more important for you to stand out among other applicants than ever before. Hiring managers want to know they’re absolutely making the right choice when they bring a new person into a company. The one tool that pre-sells your potential is your curriculum vitae, or CV—and it needs to count.

As a professional representation of who you are, your CV should  be sharply tailored to the job you’re applying for. Targeting your CV for a specific industry and using it to hit all the right notes before the interview will vastly improve your chances of being hired. Here are a few tips or making your CV as relevant as it can be for the job you’re going after.

- Use the job description to frame your career objective and qualifications

The employer is looking for a person who can fulfill the exact ideals spelled out in the job description. Use that information to your advantage. Thoroughly review the job description and highlight the ideas and concepts that you’re familiar with, as well as the required skills that you’re confident you possess. Take those terms and use them to craft a specific one-sentence career objective, which you should place at the very top of your CV, immediately after the header and before anything else. As an alternative, you  can make a note of the required skills in the job description and use the ones that best describe you in your list of qualifications.  For example, if you’re applying for work as a web designer, requirements are likely to include experience writing in the C and Java programming languages, which you can then list in your qualifications (if it’s true, of course). If you’re seeking a technical support job, you could say in your objective that you want to support a company and its clientele with your  knowledge of computer systems and networks

The idea is that, right from the start, you’re telling the hiring manager exactly what  he or she wants to hear—that you’re the new employee they’ve been looking for.

- Highlight relevant work experience that reveals your skills

Your work experience is what ultimately will show the employer that you’re up to task.  Ideally, you will have had experience with similar jobs; if not, you can still describe  past duties in a way that shows you’ve used the required  skills before.

Your jobs should be listed in reverse chronological order, starting with the current or most recent position. For each job, highlight the title you held and your responsibilities. When writing your past job duties, keep in mind what the prospective job demands, and adjust your descriptions to fit the mold. Furthermore, if a certain past job bears too little resemblance to the prospective one, or if it required a vastly different skill set, it may be best to leave it out.  For instance, an aspiring financial analyst probably shouldn’t list her brief experience as an art teacher.