First CV

2 minute read Published: 2020-12-11

Recently I gave an advice to a guy who was looking for a job as intern. He sent me CV and this was my feedback. I changed content to make it more general and helpful for most of junior specialists.

Intent

Senior's CV usually good yet short. Years of experience helped to remove all unnecessary information and despite popularity of T-shape specialists all have their own 2-3 key skills. Situation completely different for juniors. If you have no speciality, you need to narrow your search area. For example you definitely should not write that you are ready to work as operational engineer, software developer and business analyst at the same. Ideally you should have some understanding where to start your career and look for "Java Backend Developer" position. For many reasons it's hard so you have two options.

In second case you will need to have some changes from one position to another

Summary

This is usually a first thing recruiter or interviewer will look at and this part will be a thing you should write based on requirements you saw in a job description. Write two to three sentences and fit these things there:

Write this down, read it loud, maybe show it someone and rewrite it from scratch.

Experience

This part won't change for all variants of your CV. It's your real experience with latest place of work on top. If you haven't job experience or only a little, than include educational trainings and participation in some professional activities here. Non related to applied position jobs can be listed if the rest of experience is less than three places. Each should include technologies stack and what did YOU personally do there.

Side note

Usually on aside you will place additional skills, like foreign languages, soft-skills and information not directly related to the applied position.

As a result you should have one A4 page of information. Everything else goes to LinkedIn, personal blog or website, GitHub account, etc. All links should be in your CV, you know, obvi =)

P.S.

Don’t be afraid of rejections, bad interviews and long lasting search. First job is usually a roulette and you may get it even not looking for while those who hardly try won’t get it even after several months.