Your CV is too long
Your CV is a personal Career Balance Sheet; like the Balance Sheet or Income Statement used in Accounting.
The CV lists absolutely everything you have done since kindergarten, primary school, the first job to the current; it can include dates, periods, all training activities or articles, publications. You name it. It can stand the toughest of audits.
CV comes from Latin and is short for Curriculum Vitae, roughly translated to mean the course or route of your life.
But here’s the thing when you are job hunting. You need a marketing document to introduce yourself on the job market. – not a CV Balance Sheet. Luckily, the French have a word for “summary”; the word is résumé.
So if you have a CV of many pages, I recommend you to make a summary of max two pages. Call that your resume from now on. Save the document starting with your first name; example: tom.sorensen.resume.doc.
I have more than 40 years work experience and my own resume is still only two pages. If you want the secret, please email me.
In conclusion, it takes professional recruiters about 15 seconds to read a resume. We have no time to read four, six or eight pages. Period.
A lengthy CV can not only be a horrible reading experience, but it can also demonstrate that the candidate in question has poor written communication skills, and doesn’t understand their audience properly. If a candidate doesn’t understand the need to keep their CV short and sharp in order to hold the attention of busy recruiters and ensure that their CV is read properly, you have to question their general communication abilities.
A candidate who delivers a 7-page CV with chunky unreadable paragraphs of text and huge quantities of superfluous information, might not be able to deliver concise reports to stakeholders or send brief update emails to clients.
If you are reviewing a lengthy CV, you should certainly carry out some due diligence into the candidate’s communication skills before considering to put them forward for any roles.
