CRUX's Guide to Rewriting CV points

It's the CV review season! In the next month, you'd be spending most of your time, making multiple revisions to your CV until the last few minutes of your CV calls. In this blog, members of XLRI's consulting committee - CRUX,  will try to explain their philosophy behind rewriting good CV points with examples from their own first versions of their CVs. 

1) Structuring the CV: As the top left quadrant is the area that is most critical and I ensured that it has the most impactful points – and started ordering my academic points accordingly. Also ensured that all my nos. and impact figures must line in the upper diagonal part of the resume as the recruiter would ideally read from left to right and with decreasing attention as they glance down.

2) Creating an excellent First Impression via Flag Line & Remarks: The first line of impression remains the flag point line, which needs to mention your story in a line- max 3-4 points (kept from different buckets to avoid unidimensional appearance). Consistency in academic performance was a major point of my life story and figured it would be best to point it out and create a strong first impression

3) Avoid verbosity: Eg. Clearly communicated the JEE Mains and Advance ranks in a single line to provide the reader with concise information and create space to add other points across buckets

4) Winner Effect: Could have improved this further by keeping the best of the two achievements as both have very similar connotations. However, chose to create the winner effect as I had the names of the awards and clustered it with consecutive points from the CV

5) Crisp Communication:

a) Selective bolding – Towards the end, the points were filled with data and quantitative points and hence felt that it was important to bolden the sentences in such a way to ensure the reader is able to quickly grasp the essence via just the bold text in each point. 

b) Communicating the impact: Also, here I tried to eventually make the technically jargon-heavy research points easier for someone from a non-technical background by focusing on the impact of work rather than the methodology used. Also decided to go with the professional name for thesis and mark that points are exclusively in water management.

6) Clarify with details – Clarified any points/titles/ awards wherever critical to leave minimum scope for interpretation for the reader. E.g. mention the scale of the event, the content of the event, mention your organization as NGO in social buckets, etc.

Finally, did a meticulous check of spelling and formatting errors along with sentence ending alignment for all points to ensure that small things don’t leave a bad taste in the reader’s mind.

Optional: P.S. A few shortcuts that come in handy – Ctrl+D to adjust spacing – used it to adjust the spacing in a single word too

Shift+ Alt+ Up/Down – To quickly move the points up and down in a row

My approach to CV reviews: Did CV reviews from those with profiles initially similar to mine for robust framing & refining of points as much as possible. Further, discussed my CV points with those having radically different backgrounds for fine-tuning of points to ensure that they are lucid and deliver impact to any reader.

For example, look at these points for an early version of my CV about my internship with Deloitte LLP.

Now look at the same points after many rounds of revisions. The first thing that you'd notice would be the use of numbers to quantify the quantum of impact. Next, I replaced weak action words like 'worked' with stronger ones like 'researched'. Similarly, in the same bucket, two action words like 'studied' should not be repeated. Additionally, I also replaced BEPS with its full form to decrease jargon burden in my one pager.

Making a good one-pager requires a lot of time, patients, and perseverance. It will not happen overnight or in a couple of sittings. Keep persisting and working on your CV with your seniors and you will definitely be able to get the best version of your CV before the first CV call comes. All the best!

Certain tips that helped me during my processes were: 

1. Having numbers balanced across the section, essentially ensuring numbers don’t get skewed to any side.

2. Selective bolding should make sense of its own and weave a story. Randomly bolding numbers doesn’t really help. 

3. Highlighting impact/outcome is more relevant than the process mostly. 

4. Usage of appropriate and diverse action words help keep the use engaged. Ensure you don’t use words that are in line with your actual involvement. 

5. Start and end great, the flag points and the last couple of points are noticed even by the recruiters who are trying to skim through. 

6. Try to use numbers across different categories such as - monetary/time/percentage/ percentile/ fractions to avoid making data look monotonous. 

7. Do multiple reviews and make sure you do so iteratively.