There is a company called Working Links who specialise in getting long term unemployed people back to work. The company I work for write competancy based CVs for Working Links clients. They also do private professional CVs too but it is mainly Working Links ones I have been doing.
The clients fill out a fact finding form which is then used as the basis for their CV. Because their employment history can be patchy, missing chunks or non existant we focus on their skills and qualities rather than their career to date. A lot of the clients do not have English as their first language or are simply not able to put together a CV to reflect their skills in a coherant or well presented manner.
An amount of it is creative writing to a point, striking a balance between the believeable and the truth and designed to get them a foot in the door of whatever industry they are seeking work in – usually catering, retail or manual work. Having worked in catering, retail and recruitment in the past I can easily identify which of their skills and life experiences are likely to be relevant to a potential employer and play them up, but of course outright lying is not an option.
I’ve done a couple of CVs for private customers through them too – there was a woman who’d worked in retail but having had two children she wanted to retrain in childcare and was looking for a nursery placement while getting a NVQ so I had to show how her skills would be transferable from one to the other.
I quite enjoy it actually, it’s the aspect of working in recruitment that I most enjoyed when I did it and it fits in really easily with being attached to my laptop most of the time 😉 They have started to do odd days in the Working Links offices interviewing clients direct to fill out the forms for CVs and that is what they were interested in me doing if I could sort childcare out. I think it would be very ad hoc but I’d really enjoy it if it happened.
I wonder if my sister could do that (shes a Recruitment office manager) if she gave up work after the baby… hmm…
Comment by Merry — 23 March 2006 @ 4:41 pm
existant
coherant
Are you alright luv’?
So do the employers know the cvs are from Working Links when they get them, or do they get a shock when the interviewee can’t speak English?
I’ve got an interview on Monday 😉
Comment by Paul McCartney — 23 March 2006 @ 5:05 pm
thanks – would you believe I put them in there to test you? 😉
Yeah it would be fairly obvious that they are ‘professionally prepared CVS’ but I don’t think that is too unusual these days anyway. Lots of really well qualified people still use a CV writing service.
Given most of the one’s I’ve done so far have Bengali as their first language and live and want to work in areas of London where that is the norm English is probably superfluous anyway!
And I heard – so you’ll be attending then? Don’t you have some record to maintain?
Comment by Nic — 23 March 2006 @ 5:15 pm
So does that mean you are responsible for writing those nauseating me, me, me statements that are now routinely appearing at the start of peoples’ cvs that instead of saying anything about them, actually say ‘I am a fucking twat and am not even capable of putting together my own cv’?’ 🙂
We use letters and CVs and no applications forms in order that there is a real paper opportunity to tell something about people before the interview. These cv writing services have a habit of making all the cvs look the same and this then assumes that short-listers have time to read them to determine the difference between applicants. Yeah right…
So I use the envelope colour first to reduce numbers to a more manageable number for opening. Then I assess paper quality – cheap-skates are out (not serious applicants), expensive paper users are out (as they think we will be impressed by their paper, duh). Next I eliminate anybody called Graham. Then I assess font, I prefer something like arial (perhaps no more than 10pt) and all paragraphs justified with each paragraph start indented, apart from the first. Anyone who lives in a house with a number is excluded for being a middle-class ponce. This leaves me with less than a handful to actually read, apart from the address and name that is.
So anyone who mentions sewing is cast in the bin. Or ‘I enjoy socialising with my friends’ – how thrilling you must be? Anyone who reports the grades of their GCSE’s – like we care that you got 5 A and 4A*…..in my day…. Anyone returning to work after maternity leave – they’re out – can’t stand all that baby nonsense in the workplace. Anyone who mentions supporting Reading FC are in, as are any individuals with experience (recent) of being swedish au pairs.
I’m rambling.
Comment by Paul McCartney — 23 March 2006 @ 5:21 pm
That should be without a number…..
Comment by Paul McCartney — 23 March 2006 @ 5:22 pm
And no I don’t think I will be attending the interview…..it appears that I am rather wanted where I am 🙂
Comment by Paul McCartney — 23 March 2006 @ 5:23 pm
That’s what the people who set up CKFutures did I think Merry – worked in Recruitment Consultancy and then set up their own company doing the bits they liked best.
If you google for CV writing there are loads of places doing it, although how many are individuals I am not sure. I’ve thought about trying to get more freelance work doing it but I am not confident enough to start doing that just yet. Currently I still have the safety net of them checking over my ‘work’ before it reaches Working Links.
I was once recruited for a management job by an independant recruitment consultant who worked freelance for herself and did the whole recruitment for this company working a couple of days a week. She liaised with the company MD on writing the job adverts, interviewing and job offers, reference checking and training and induction. I always thought that was a really cool job. Maybe your sister could look at something like that if she had any childcare options as a lot of what she did was from home.
Comment by Nic — 23 March 2006 @ 5:58 pm
Rambling but amusingly so, so feel free to carry on! 🙂
Yeah, that’d be what I do. BUT I do attempt to keep them as personal as it is possible to do without actually meeting someone. Every one I write is different and would aim to actually identify the person as an individual. But I won’t pretend to be any more moral or ethical about it than that. Ultimately I’m in it for the money! 😉
When I look back at my own CVs over the years I tried all sorts of cheap well known tricks to get interviews like using pastel coloured paper and so on. Usually worked too – I always used to handwrite the covering letter (having worked with someone who wrote a book on graphology and employed me partially on the basis of my handwriting that was clearly a plus for me! 😉 ) but I never went down the route of sticking a tea bag in with it so they could sit down and enjoy reading with a cuppa!
And lol to the house name – my parents have one of those!
Comment by Nic — 23 March 2006 @ 6:08 pm
Hand-written = unable to use or afford a computer = loser
Comment by Chris — 23 March 2006 @ 6:47 pm
Oi, Paul – are they going to give you more money then?
Comment by Sarah — 24 March 2006 @ 11:31 am