Maximising the Impact of your CV (or résumé)

So you’ve seen a job you really like, and you’re dead keen to apply. Instead of the usual pesky form that un-formats itself halfway through your attempt to complete it, however, applications are being received in the form of CV and covering letter. Now is the time to get that CV to work for you.

Definition of a Curriculum Vitae

The first thing I want to do is establish what we actually mean when we use the term ‘CV’, as there is a subtle but significant difference between how the term is understood in British English than in American English.

In British English, a CV is a short overview over a few pages of a person’s work history, qualifications, training courses attended, membership of professional bodies, publications and key achievements. It is more a summary than a comprehensive review, and is typically no more than a few pages in length. In American English, it would be understood as a résumé.

The term CV in American English refers to an all-encompassing capture of a person’s work history, qualifications, etc. It may sometimes run to multiple pages if referring to a particularly experienced candidate. In British English, there is no equivalent term – but perhaps there should be…for reasons I will explain below.

Compile a master copy of your CV

…And make sure it contains everything you have done which is worthy of note. In general, writing things down is good practice. The very act of writing can compound learning experiences, as well as creating a record more lasting than our very fallible memories. You may want to keep a learning journal for more detailed scenarios, but for now you should focus on compiling every duty and responsibility you have had in a professional capacity, every major task completed, every project worked, every training course attended and every qualification received. Crucially, you should try to keep a record of the boring most details – dates, places, and names of trainers – as these are the most easily forgotten. Update all this information at regular intervals.

Obviously, there is little point in recording the minutiae of what you had for lunch on Wednesday 10^th April 2013 (Macaroni Cheese) or how your hay fever was on that particular day. But in other respects, try to be as detailed as possible.

Let your master copy run to as many pages as possible. It doesn’t matter how long it gets, for the resulting document is strictly for your eyes only. Because before even considering sending it off to a prospective employer, you have serious work to do.

Tailor your CV for each individual job application

You know the score. At least you do if you have read my earlier posts here and here. The criteria which you must fulfil to be shortlisted for a position will have been outlined under the personal specification on the job advert. The sort of daily duties and responsibilities that will form the ‘bread and butter’ of the role will have been outlined under the job description. You will need to make sure that your CV is as relevant as it possibly can be to the position for which you are applying.

That is going to take some tweaking, and your master CV is going to have to be severely trimmed. Applying for a collections-heavy role? Emphasise that collections care internship you did, and go light on the details of that summer job you had working in a dog-grooming parlour.

How long should my non-master CV be?

Now we are on to a seriously contentious topic. From university careers services’ CV workshops, to vaguely remembered titbits of advice from secondary (high) school, there is no doubt in terms of what received wisdom has to say. Received wisdom says it’s two sides of A4, maximum.

Then, in the course of my museums career (either as a volunteer or as a professional), I have come across supervisors and managers who have dared to challenge that received wisdom. You want the job, these elders said, so make sure your CV covers all the bases. It doesn’t matter how long it is, as long as you show yourself to be the ideal candidate.

I was fairly quick in taking on the message of the long CV-supporting elders. Not least because I was finding my CV getting rather long rather quickly with the amount of voluntary work and short-term contracts I’ve been taking on over the past five years. My CV has been three sides of A4 for a while now. I have really struggled to get it down to two sides without omitting important things. What the long-CV elders said fitted my circumstances and my agenda, and so I must declare my initial bias.

Stuck between the received wisdom and the long-CV elders, I decided to take to twitter to try and get a straight and definitive answer from my network of museum tweeps. My request for opinions attracted some quite passionate answers:

When I mentioned how difficult I found it to keep my own CV down to two sides, Rupert Shepherd of the National Gallery made these suggestions:

While Anita Pickerden, a lecturer in Leadership and Management, had this to say:

(Anita taught me on a Heritage Management programme at the University of Worcester – do DM her for interview practice if you are based in the West Midlands!)

While Tamsin Russell of the Museums Association has this opinion to add:

The vox pop had spoken. The balance of opinion probably results more from my own selection-bias than anything else. So next I wanted to get something a bit more grounded in raw data, and something which I could not corrupt – so I set up a twitter poll, and got the following results.

On the one hand, these results seem pretty unequivocal. One thing this twitter poll can’t do, though, is tell me how many respondents were seasoned recruiters themselves, and how many were less experienced museum workers simply passing on the received wisdom of ages past. Clearly, some more experienced museum professionals did take part in the poll – and one respondent was particularly frank in outlining the sorts of pressures that short-listers can be under:

Yet, going back to what Rupert Shepherd said about focus –relevance and clarity can be more important than sheer length (or lack of).

My conclusion? I still have no idea. I will continue to stick to three sides myself, and it certainly hasn’t seemed to have done me much harm in the past. Each of my managers or supervisors who I have asked in the past about this issue has said three sides is fine – but they are the very people who hired me! My faith in three sides being the optimum length for a CV (mine or anyone else’s) is not sufficiently strong enough for me to consider recommending it. What I can say is that five pages is definitely too long, unless you are going for a role with a very heavy academic leaning.

But if you did need to trim…

Remember to keep everything focused and relevant to each individual vacancy. Key areas to consider trimming would be:

• Non-transferable skills gained from outside the sector. But definitely include the transferable skills if you have room – see more here.
• Early school and 6^th Form college qualifications. A caveat though: sometimes jobs ask specifically for GCSE Maths or English at Grade C or above. Also, if like me, you are an arts graduate but have some science A levels, you might want to include them if there’s a chance that they’ll be relevant.
• Interests and hobbies. Yes, they can make you seem like a well-rounded character – but most screeners of applications will only consider the skills and experiences specified in the job advert.

Keep your formatting clear and concise

There is no doubt that the selection panel will be having to wade through an awful lot of CVs. Brevity might be your friend, but clarity will be a key and indispensable ally. The panel should be able to glance at your CV and straight away get an accurate (and hopefully favourable) overview of your work history and qualifications. Some things which might help you:

• Use bullet points!
• Use nice wide margins and generous spacing to break-up blocky text
• Highlight key information in bold
• Keep it structured and chronological, but front-load with your most important and exciting information at the top of the first page. You might need to make a judgement call on whether your work experience or whether your qualifications are the most impressive thing about you as a candidate.

Proofread!

Because spelling mistakes can really piss off some people.

 

 

In the next post, I will upload a copy of my CV for you to have a look at. Any feedback or suggestions will be grateful received!

 

Interviews: Part Five. Coping with failure

So you come out of your interview, and you breathe a sigh of relief. But you can’t feel properly relaxed just yet. The panel told you that they will let you know the outcome within a few days. Now it’s a waiting game – and although there is nothing you can do to alter the result, you are going to feel anxious for the next few days. The best thing to do is to try and occupy yourself and take your mind off things.

Then, finally, the news comes through. You’ve failed. You feel hurt and disappointed, which is completely natural, but here’s what to do next so that you can learn from your defeat.

Firstly, don’t take it personally. The fact is that museum job vacancies are very oversubscribed, and attract many high-quality candidates. You have not lost out because the panel didn’t like you, or thought someone was ‘better’ than you in terms of their innate qualities and attributes. In all likelihood, the post was offered to someone who simply had more skills and more experience than yourself. Sure it sucks, and I know how much you wanted that job – but the thing you absolutely must not do is let your defeat dent your confidence, and slip into an intractable malaise. Here are some positive things you can do instead:

A ship in distress

Ask for Feedback

Really do. It’s the done thing – so don’t worry about seeming to be somehow presumptuous or cheeky. The feedback will also tend to be on the constructive side, so do not be scared of the criticism. In any case, it can be really useful to have an external viewer point out your weaknesses to you, which you can then work on as areas for improvement.

The feedback might also let you know what the successful candidate had which you didn’t – be it experience in particular areas of collections management, qualifications or subject specialist knowledge and expertise. Again, it’s all about identifying areas for improvement and trying to overcome your most important skills gaps.

Do not be bitter and bear grudges

I used to joke that any museum that had ever rejected me in anyway was on my ‘blacklist’. I haven’t been keeping up with that blacklist – and if I had, it would be very, very long by now. As I said above, failing at interview (or not being invited at all) can feel like a personal attack – but it really isn’t, and shouldn’t be treated as such. Don’t ever burn your bridges with organisations or with people – you never know what they might have on offer in the future.

I failed to be invited to interview when I applied to be a volunteer at the National Army Museum, which felt particularly disappointing. But I applied for another voluntary role there a few months later and got it – and what a role it was!

Similarly, my first paid role in the sector was as a Trainee Curatorial Assistant at Worcester Cathedral Library and Archive. Part of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Skills for the Future programme, the scheme took in three tranches of trainees, each tranche for 15 months, over a four-year period. I had been interviewed for tranche two and didn’t get it – and felt truly gutted – but I re-applied for tranche three and have never looked back.

Assess your interview notes

Remember how I told you to take your notes with you into interview, as well as a pen? This wasn’t just so you could recall your pre-prepared answers to expected interview questions. It was also so that you had somewhere to write down any particularly interesting or difficult questions that the panel asked you – especially those ones for which you hadn’t prepared.

A top tip here – collate all of those tricky questions into one place. Work out answers to them, using the STAR technique etc. Regularly review this centralised document, so that it’s always fresh in your mind – and add to it after each interview you attend.

Engage with the panel over social media and Linked-In

This might seem a bit of a brazen move, but I think it is absolutely fine to treat each interview as an opportunity to build your professional network. Remember that you should have prepared lots of questions for the interview panel. That will let the whole process become something more discursive and less like an examination. You will have learnt sector-related things from the panel and they from you. The next step is to re-enforce those acquaintanceships with a little follow on Twitter or a little invite on Linked-In.

Fall back, re-group and fight another day

Find out who got the job

While I can’t emphasise enough how important it is to ask for feedback from the panel, the sad truth is that they might not always give you quite as much detail as you might like about why they chose somebody else over you. Sometimes they might even just be lying to you. Here’s what to do:

Wait for a couple of months. Jobs with ‘immediate starts’ are very rare in the museum sector. And you’ll also have to wait for the victor to update their linked-in account. When they do (and you find it via some savvy googling), you can have a good riffle through their profile, and see what they have which you don’t. Sometimes too you can spot an inside job, where signs of personal connections between the victor and the hiring organisation or its staff might put the whiff of suspicion about nepotism in the air.

Be kind to yourself

I didn’t give you permission to sink into a prolonged period of self-pity, but it’s absolutely fine to be sad. Do something to cheer yourself up. Arrange to see a friend, head to the pub or the cinema, or treat yourself to some chocolate. You’ve been through a tough time.

Another suggestion I’ve heard from an old colleague is to maintain a ‘happy box’. Keep anything in there that might cheer you up. It could be pictures of family, friends or pets, prizes and certificates, print-outs of particularly glorious tweets, old love letters, mementoes from previous conquests, or a bag of emergency Percy Pigs. Whenever you feel those ol’ blues coming on down, just pull out the box for a bit of affirmation that you’re a good person, and reminder of every time you’ve had fun, achieved something brilliant, felt loved or got lucky.

Claim back your travel expenses

Not every place will oblige, but in my experience, something between a third and a half will oblige – but often the onus is on you to ask. Please do so – because who doesn’t like money?

Interviews: Part Four. The Big Day

In the previous posts, I discussed interview questions, how to prepare your answers to those questions, and what to expect from interview tests. In this post, I want to deal with everything else – what to take with you to interview, what to wear, how to get to the interview venue, and what to do when you arrive there.

What to take with you

Remember that it is completely fine to take notes in with you to an interview. Get these out at the start and have them in front of you for ease of reference. It might also be worthwhile to have a copy of your CV or resume to hand. Have a pen out too – it can help to give your nervous hands something to do! It is likely that you will have been asked to bring your passport and/ or birth certificate to interview too – so try not to forget either of those.

It would also be sensible to take a print-out of your invite and a map of the venue and surrounding area. Do not just rely on your phone – it can both run out of juice and not be able to find any connectivity. Obviously, do bring your phone as well.

Cash is always useful – especially if you are travelling to a rural area, where taxis, buses and some pubs and cafes will be unable to accept card payments.

Remember your medication if you are on any, and there can also be a few useful medicines to have on you. Nervous diarrhoea is a real thing and can happen to any of us – with fairly dire consequences in some cases – but fortunately anti-diarrhoea capsules can work rather quickly. Less catastrophic but still very annoying could be a sneezing fit. If you are at all susceptible to hay fever, then a precautionary anti-histamine might not be a bad thing. Also tissues, and lots of them. And plasters for any new-shoes woes.

Remember an umbrella too.

What to wear

You will not be formally assessed on your attire, of course – but it can help to influence the panel in case of a dead heat. So here goes (and sorry for focusing on gentlemen’s fashion, but I’ve never dressed as a lady at interview before):

No need to overdress. Japanese armour in the Royal Danish Arsenal Museum, Copenhagen.

Aim for the smarter side, but a full suit may not be necessary. I tend to go for a jacket and tie. A light grey tweed jacket is my choice.  My only suit is a dinner suit (or tuxedo in American), which would be far too formal. Better to scrimp on the formality than to go for a horrible suit – which will only make you look like a footballer at a wedding or a defendant at court.

Shoes should be clean and polished. If any of the panel even have a smidgeon of a military background, you will be completely and utterly screwed if your shoes are not at their best.

Save your best, comfiest and roomiest underwear for the big day. That can pay dividends. Sure, your lucky pants may have helped you to score during your younger years, but can you really maintain focus with that seam cutting into your intimate regions?

Finally, headwear. Are you a stupid hipster who wears stupid hipster hats? Don’t.

Getting there

Do not be late. It reflects very badly. You should aim to report for interview at least ten minutes before the time stated on your invite. If you at all can, have a dry run to the venue from your home. Reconnaissance of possible obstacles and likely delays can be invaluable. To be forewarned is to be forearmed – it’s all just a microcosm of the route planning techniques we use in collections management. If you are travelling by train, make sure there are no rail strikes planned for the day in question. If you are travelling by car, make sure your vehicle is in good condition and that you have enough fuel. In both cases, have a plan B.

Arrive at the general vicinity of your interview as early as you can. Factor in a margin of error in case of delay – at least an hour for all but the shortest of journeys. Scout around for the exact place you need to report to, and then kill some time.

The last thing you want is to be rushing around right before your interview. This will make you feel stressed and nervous. If, like me, you are on the slightly larger size, it can also produce some fairly prodigious amounts of sweat in the summer months. Not ideal. You want to stroll – slowly and elegantly with a cool grace – up to the venue, not run.

Before you go in

What you do next is entirely up to you. You could wander round the museum or heritage site (which could be useful), or you could go for a walk or head to a café. Whatever works for you. Listening to empowering music may be your thing, or it could be sitting down with deep breathing and a herbal tea. Maybe even some power poses in front of a mirror.

There are, however, some things which you should definitely not do before going into an interview. We may all of us be at our absolute best after one-and-a-bit pints, but even the smallest amount of alcohol can be smelt on your breath, and that would make for a very bad impression indeed. Very bad.

If you are a smoker, you may feel a particular urge for a fag just before the interview. Please try to hold off though. The smell will linger for far longer than your smoker’s nose can possibly detect, and chewing a load of mints right before you go in will simply make you smell like someone who’s chewed a load of mints in order to cover up the smell of cigarettes.

When you go in

Greet the panel. Handshakes should be firm, but not crushing. Repeat the person’s name back to them as they introduce themselves – it will help you to remember it. Get your notes out and ready on the table. Ask if you can take your jacket off, and sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Do not use weird body language, and decline a hot drink if offered – what do you think this is? Maintain eye contact with the panel, smile, and answer their questions.

Good luck! In the next section, I will talk about what to do when you inevitably fail (which you will, sorry).