Whether you are a recent graduate or coming up to your final few months left in university, you will be thinking about how to make sure you stand out from the crowd with your graduate CV!
Did you know it can take some employers just 7 seconds to judge a CV? Here are 5 top tips on how to make sure your graduate CV grabs their attention.
Profile
A good graduate CV will usually include a short profile at the top. Usually this will be no more than 100 words and should be tailored to the job being applied for. For example, ‘Recent Psychology graduate keen to secure a role working with children in a school-based setting’. This lets the recruiter know that you are serious about the specific role and not just sending your CV out on a mass basis.
To go one step further and really impress, personalise your profile with specific names of the company that you are applying to.
Contact Information
Making it easy for the employer to find your contact information is key when writing a graduate CV. Put your name, phone number, email address and home address centrally at the top of your CV. You can make this bold and a couple of sizes bigger than the rest of the text. Adding a hyperlink to your Linkedin profile helps too!
Layout
The preferred layout of a graduate teacher CV is highly subjective and one size will not fit all here. However, it is important to ensure that important information is easy to find and that the CV flows well. For a graduate, we would recommend the following order: Contact information, personal profile, education, work history, key skills and achievements, interests and hobbies, followed finally by references (or on references on request).
It is important that your experience in reverse chronological order – your most recent education/work history should be first.
Keeping your CV to two pages is likely to keep a potential employer more engaged and interested. Pick a professional font – Calibri or Ariel normally work well.
Dates and Grades
When adding work history and education to a graduate CV, remember to include dates of employment/study. This particularly helps with roles in education as it allows us to identify any gaps that we may need clarification on due to safeguarding. Be proud of your grades and the subjects that you study, include them in your CV!
Take your time!
Make sure that you take your time to read the job description and tailor your CV to demonstrate how you meet the requirements. We know it can be tough applying for roles when the competition is high and especially during a pandemic. This may mean you are applying for many jobs. However, if you take even 5 minutes to personalise your CV to the role you are applying for, it will make all the difference.
Need more help writing a graduate CV?
Feel free to contact us for any further advice on writing a graduate CV!