The reason this exists is because even highly qualified graduates (Harvard included) suck at writing CV's/Resumes. How do i know? I went to a similar kind of college.
All of us go through the same 16-20 year education grind (K-12 + University). At the end of it we are made to differentiate ourselves through our CV's/Resumes.
A simple rule of thumb: A CV/Resume should be strictly-one-page and honest. Not sure if anyone needs cover letters anymore.
You absolutely will have to leave details out - the HR person scanning through 30+ CVs doesn’t have the time or interest in reading through 3 pages of your work history to see if you tick the boxes they’re trying to match. You don’t have to list every job you’ve had, just list the relevant recent ones for the job you’re applying for. The ones you’ll talk about in your interview.
How can HR know if my experience is relevant for the position? Do they even understand what my CV says? I know people in HR that could do it. But most likely no.
In my previous company, resumes were forwarded to us, the tech team. After all we’re the one recruiting, and we’re the one who will maybe work with this person. We were also the ones giving technical interviews, and also did a team interview.
HR should not be in charge of recruiting for the teams.
Perhaps this can succeed at a low growth company, not making many hires. Did you conduct your own sourcing as well, proactively engaging 'cold leads' you found on linkedin, twitter, github, etc? Most hires don't come from job postings - they are recruited, and its a laborious task, esp if its a specialized niche or skillset. You need the recruiting team if you plan on growing quickly.
> the HR person scanning through 30+ CVs doesn’t have the time or interest in reading through 3 pages of your work history to see if you tick the boxes they’re trying to match.
I've 25 years experience. Listing only the last 10 or 15 would leave important details out. Cluttering all in one page would be awful. Even if I write a "one line" for the positions in the first years of employment, I cannot put it on one page.
Like coding rules: you cannot make hard rules that apply always. It depends.
Depending on the role, resume readers typically don't care about where or what you worked on more than 2 jobs ago or 5 years ago, unless it is uniquely germane to the job being applied for.
Tons and tons of employers will still require or expect a cover letter. At least in the US.
Résumé guidance is all over the place and I think largely comes down to the reader's preferences, which are wildly inconsistent, so there's no such thing as the One Best Résumé layout and/or length. See a sibling post claiming that a one-pager is a "red flag".
None of this is scientific and every single thing you do during an application and interview process can easily be one hiring manager's "best practice" and another's "red flag". It's a minefield, because it's all basically arbitrary but many people in the hiring process will have strong feelings about various unimportant details, regardless, because they're just casting about for some signal in all the noise, such that they end up taking a lot of the noise as signal.
Most effective cover letter I ever experimented with was a simple preamble expressing interest in the company and the particular position (2-3 sentences, just enough to demonstrate basic eloquence), followed by "In the sake of brevity, here's a T-chart matching my qualifications to your requirements:" where I put in a T-chart pairing most of the bullet points in the job posting with a description of the skills I had. Since most of the requirements were similar between multiple job postings, I had LaTeX shortcuts to reference a pre-made pile of qualification statements. Took me about 5 minutes to hammer out, and definitely improved my rate of receiving responses by about a factor of 2.
> A CV/Resume should be strictly-one-page and honest.
Yeah, no. I was an advocate for this until recently. I realized it's not fitting anymore. Maybe I should do a dumbed-down version in the first page and fill the position details on the second.
I always stick to 2 pages (25 years ~10 jobs) but include the URL of the HTML version of my CV/resume which has the full details of each role. You may need to be creative about how you include the URL... as some recruiters will edit it out if you put it in the header or footer.
If your resume is a single page, you send the message that most of what you did isn't relevant, isn't important or doesn't matter. I see this as a red flag.
Or they basically only need cover letters with a pro forma resume because they’re going through their network which has been my case for 25 years or so.
All of us go through the same 16-20 year education grind (K-12 + University). At the end of it we are made to differentiate ourselves through our CV's/Resumes.
A simple rule of thumb: A CV/Resume should be strictly-one-page and honest. Not sure if anyone needs cover letters anymore.