25 Tips to boost your CV !

We know that our education, skills, experience and achievements do not change on a daily basis so why we cannot make a CV and send that to every place where we want to apply ? We do not do this because we know that every recruiter has different expectations from us. But can we know what those expectations are ? Now here it gets tricky. If a recruiter is looking for a Java programmer then the task is very easy — “A java programmer with six years of work experience”. This single sentence is good enough for someone to get short-listed and get an interview call. However, “ A Data scientist with six years of experience” is a very ill defined description for a job of a data scientist, mainly because the job of a data scientist needs a much larger skill set from many different domains such as mathematics, statistics, computer science, business, research, software engineering, storytelling etc.

Here I will present a set of tips which can be used to improve your CV and make that more effective.

1. If you have a degree/diploma from a reputed University/college or work experience in a reputed company make sure that that stands out.
2. Avoid populating your CV with online courses you have attended in the last six months. I have found that many students who have certificates of these courses have poor understanding of concepts due to lack of enough practice.
3. It should not be hard for recruiters to find out the highest educational qualification you have. I have come across a CV where I could not find what highest educational qualification the person had.
4. Praising yourself too much about your skills may backfire unless you have solid evidence to back the claims.
5. Self published articles, books etc., should never be a part of CV. They carry no value.
6. If you have a rich GitHub page then mentioning the link to that is a big +
7. At least three programming language in which you have good hold must stand out.
8. Without Python nothing moves so make sure that you are familiar with Pandas, Numpy, Matplotlib etc.
9. Tensorflow, Keras & Scikit-learn are minimum frameworks which must be a part of your skillet.
10. I will recommend to breakup your CV in the following sections: Education, Skills, Work experience, Achievements, Goals & Personal data.
11. Information in the form of bullet points is more informative than long descriptions.
12. Avoid making the CV too artistic using fancy themes, fonts loud colours. Maybe use just 2–3 fonts. Black & white text is good.
13. Your email & phone number should clearly stand out. Maybe you can put that in the top.
14. Check your CV carefully particularly any mistakes in the email I’d & phone number. Any mistake there can cost you a job.
15. Proofreading manually & using a spell checker is a great idea never forget doing that.
16. Long & ugly URLs are not good to have in a CV. Hyperlinking is a better option.
17. One of the important things to keep in mind is the order of information you put in your CV. I have noticed that reviewers spend more time on earlier sections than on the later ones. So put everything important in the first few sections. Basic information and less important facts can come later.
18. It is useful to mention your hobbies in the CV but they can come later. For a data scientist being a badminton player is good but that is not the primary skill on the basis the person will be shortlisted.
19. In many cases (like in my own case) it is hard to create a CV with just two pages without leaving a lot of important information. In such situations the CV can be split into two or more logical parts where the first part (leaving the list of publication out) can be self complete.
20. A CV represents the career trajectory of a person so be careful about the dates & years etc. Keeping the educational qualification and work experience in reverse chronological order is a good idea.
21. The format of a CV can be in a portable document format (PDF) or doc but never in a text or html format.
22. The CV must have a date somewhere so that recruiters know when it was last modified. I prefer to keep it at the end with the signature section.
23. There are many interesting templates online so spend some time to find which one you think looks good. If you are good in LaTex then it may be a good idea to create your own template.
24. Visualisation is an important skill in data science and in your CV also you are trying to summarise some data about yourself (of course without plots, histograms and pie charts !) so keep that in mind. What recruiters are trying to do is extract relevant information about you from your CV so make that easily available.
25. The final tip I want to give is to review your CV on regular basis and update the section in case you have something to add, for example, new skills you acquired recently or any achievement !

In case you find the article please like & share and if have comment then pose those also.

Best of luck !