Your CV may be the two words (or letters) that spell the difference between successfully getting an interview and toiling ceaselessly without getting any results.

The problem these days is that the ideal CV has changed from the way we used to think it should be written. Instead of your CV being a list of jobs you’ve held in the past, it should now be more of a marketing brochure that will highlight your best assets and help you stand out from the rest of the applicant pool.

Market Yourself!
Go ahead! Sell yourself! This is the advice of resume writing expert Denis Odlin, who works as the local manager of Australian firm Successful Resumes. And, as the company name overtly states, they specialize in helping applicants land interviews by streamlining their CVs.

According to Odlin, the long, detailed CV is now out of vogue. In its place is a more streamlined CV that is shorter and easier to understand.

More importantly, applicants should use their CVs to market themselves. The first half of the resume should be able to hook your employer and get them to buy into the idea that you are exactly the person they want to fill their vacancy.

Common mistakes
The temptation is to NOT fix something that ISN’T broken, and you reason that there isn’t anything wrong with the resume you’ve drafted right out of college, right? So, isn’t it purely logical to just add our experiences to our CV’s job list as we go along?
Wrong! And this is precisely where most of us fall short in preparing a unique and competitive resume.

The problem is that we stop trying to improve our CVs and just add to it without considering how times are changing and how employers are trying different approaches to recruitment as well as looking for different things in a candidate’s resume.
Doing this also creates a resume that is longer than what recruiters want to look at, and thus, increasing its chances of getting chucked into the unwanted pile.

What to do Instead
Instead of focusing on the things that we do wrong however, maybe it’s high time we create a list of things that we ought to be doing right. The following are a few other helpful tips that will spruce up your CV and help you land an interview.

1. Focus on your strengths and abilities as well as unique skills and talents to market yourself to the recruiter. Ask a colleague or a trusted supervisor about what makes you a unique worker. This will help you see yourself in a new perspective and bring out the achievements you have under your belt that you may have forgotten about or taken for granted.

2. Be brief and straight to the point. Don’t use ambiguous words or vague statements that will require recruiters to read between the lines.

3. Use a professional sounding e-mail address in your CV. Avoid using cutiepie15@yahoo.com or sexysenorita@hotmail.com, which you created for the fun of it. It sounds quite inappropriate and may not sit well with employers. On the flipside, avoid using your work e-mail either.