Don't use your CV/resume as a career history
Hello!
As many of you know, I run regular career advice drop-in sessions and am also a little bit of a "CV geek".
Over the last few years, I've been asked a version of this question 100s of times: "Do I really have to remove my high school GPA from my CV? I'm quite proud of that."
Fair enough – even if it's a long time in the past, it's often a real achievement. But it's also the perfect example of a bigger problem.
Most people treat their CV as a chronology of their life's work – everything they've done, in order and complete. For (ex)consultants especially, that instinct runs deep: your career is full of achievements, and leaving any of them out feels like selling yourself short.
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I think at least in part, the problem is that the only time we're ever taught how to craft a CV is at school or university. And guess what, most of us had done next to nothing by the time we were in our early twenties. So the advice we get is "just put everything on there to fill up the page".
A 3-week internship at your mum's company? Sure. A 1-week online coding bootcamp? Let's add it. The fact that you learned to tie lots of fancy knots at summer camp? Obviously.
But as your career progresses, the problem isn't that you don't have enough stuff to put on your CV. It's the opposite – you've done a million impressive things and built a wide-ranging skillset. Doing them all justice takes 2 dense pages, often more.
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Now, I've sat in the room for over 1,000 decisions of "should we invite this person to interview". And here's my #1 piece of advice from all these conversations:
Don't treat your CV as a career history. Treat it as a marketing document.
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Your CV only has one job – to show a hiring manager exactly what they need to see to justify inviting you to interview. That's it. Its only purpose is to get you the interview – the moment you're in the room, nobody looks at it critically again.
Leaving things out isn't underselling – it's making space for the things that underline how well you fit that specific role and organisation. The GPA from a decade or two ago? Almost certainly not one of those things.
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As I saw a lot of people struggling with this, I've put the 10 hiring manager behaviours I see every single time into a short article. Reflecting on all my exposure to "who to interview" decision-making, it's these 10 behaviours that crop up consistently. Understand them and you can cater to them. Cater to them, and you stand the very best chance of always hitting the "yes, interview" pile.
If you're interested, you can read about the 10 behaviours and their implications for your CV here.
I bet the overall mindset shift is one that plays to your strengths too – if you've ever had to craft an Executive Summary, you'll enjoy this read.
All the best,
Rich & the OUB team
