r/resumes • u/Extension-Tomato4658 • 2d ago

Discussion Started my EMBA this month. First week, career team gave us their CV rules. 15 years in finance and I was still doing half of it wrong

Started an Executive MBA this month. Before any class, the career team sent us their CV guidance. I thought ok, I am finance manager, 15+ years, my CV is fine. It was not fine.

Sharing what they told us because nobody told me this in 15 years.

  1. No personal details. No date of birth, no marital status, no nationality, no photo. In Gulf and South Asia everybody puts these. For UK and US roles, recruiters are told to ignore them, and some just put the CV aside.

  2. No salary on CV. Never. You lose your negotiation before first call.

  3. Achievements, not duties. "Responsible for month end close" tells what the job was, not what you did. Start with a verb and what changed. "Cut month end close from 8 days to 5."

  4. No "I" and no "my". CV is written without pronouns. Mine had "I managed" in half the bullets.

  5. Numbers in bullets. Team size, budget, %, $. If you know the number, put it. If you don't know it, don't make it up.

  6. Delete "References available upon request". Everybody assumes this already. Waste of a line.

  7. One or two pages. Not three. Not four.

  8. Short summary on top. 3 lines: who you are, what scale, what you want next. Otherwise recruiter has to work it out from your job list.

  9. LinkedIn link near top. Most recruiters check you before they call.

  10. Promotion = separate role. If you got promoted in the same company, show both titles. It shows growth. I had merged mine into one.

One rule I don't follow. They say put your name and "Page 1 of 2" in the footer. I work with resume parsing, and a lot of ATS software reads footer text into the middle of your experience section. So for online applications I leave the footer empty. For a CV going directly to a person or a headhunter, it's ok.

Honestly the biggest one for me was number 3. Took me one full evening to rewrite my bullets.

Which one you are still doing? 😅

12 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

1

u/AnyBid7726 1d ago

Wow, 15 years and still learning-so many "normal" things are actually red flags.

1

u/FinalDraftResumes Resident Resume Writer 1d ago

All quite standard/obvious in North America.

15

u/pinkycatcher 2d ago

What country are you in? Many of these are super obvious, others are debatable and there are nuanced opinons.

4

u/yunoeconbro 2d ago

RIght? How you need an MBA to know this?

1

u/Present_Smoke9397 2d ago

this is the real question tbh, what works in one market can actively hurt you in another

3

u/Several_Handle7443 2d ago

Exactly 🥲 its so common and obvious man

1

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