Sunday 14 September 2014

a thoroughly modern CV



I dislike job hunting.

It goes against everything I believe in.

Working for a living is certainly reasonable enough (in some circumstances), but being forced to distill all your skills and all your experiences in just 2 sides of A4 paper seems utterly ridiculous.... and that doesn't even leave any room for any of your personality.

So I'm left pondering how best to sell myself?


Do you go with the standard old 'team-player, hard-working, blah-blah-blah' intro/personal statement that you've had drummed into you is how a CV should open? because surely everyone else has been told the same thing about starting out that way and surely nearly every CV that drops onto a recruiters desk must lay out their initial wares in exactly the same old fashioned way...

And if you don't appear different from anybody else, how will anyone know that you are different from anyone else?

on the subject of old fashioned tho... what if the recruiter is old fashioned and wants you to stick to the same old format, play by the rules and perform exactly as expected, let us not forget that some people don't like change, and some of the people that don't like change may well be the people recruiting that wouldn't understand the concept of the post-modern self-referential CV that I had in mind...


ah, but what about LinkedIn?!? the presumably professional version of a social network.

I struggle with that too.... perhaps career-focused progression would fall in line with the way it projects itself, certainly I can see the advantages of having a full profile to browse that hasn't needed to be quit so cherry-picked in order to save space on paper, but what about poor souls like me that are still trying to find their way, where differing job sectors and careers are catching my eye, the old rule was to tailor your cover letter and CV for each job you apply for, but doesn't the modern principles of LinkedIn suddenly decide to go against that, along with every other recruitment site that would like you to upload a CV

So in brief, I need to choose who I am, to sell myself to people, when I don't know what they expect me to be....

modern job-hunting sucks.


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