Note: I am expanding here a post I wrote on linkedin some time ago:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antonioierano_cv-by-image-activity-6767487628494299136-wdlh
I often read on LinkedIn posts on recruiting and the relative difficulties bounded to typical idiosyncrasies’ Italian job market.
In my area of experience (and due to my age), one of the biggest obstacles is to make experiences and their value understood by your counterpart.
The counterpart can be a customer, your employer\manager, a hiring manager if you’re looking for a change or a Head Hunter…
How difficult is it to pass experiences from a CV?
CV is the main way you “talk” about your professional experience with the other world and nowadays is subject to an automatic ATS system that analyzes and sorts them.
I am not ashamed to say I do not like ATS. While I can understand the need for ATS products to explain how an “ATS-friendly curriculum” should be written is beyond my scope (and interests).
I will only notice here that writing a CV for an ATS means you’re trying to make your CV better indexed, which could not be the best way to express who you are. So at least you need to write 2 CVs, one for ATS, ob built for the eventual interview.
However well it can be written a CV, anyway, using it to demonstrate your real value is a titanic undertaking, the CV is dimensionless or at most one-dimensional (the timeline), and often the reader does not connect the dots (for sure this is not what an ATS do, lol)!
Your experience is not the simple sum of the things you have done, but the relationships these things have.
So I said to myself, what if I try to express my experiences differently?
To give a CV a different look from a sterile list of things can be tricky. It is necessary to remember that the length has to be short; otherwise, we go back to the hundreds of pages of CVs world. Who would read them? No one!
But if I can not use many words which are needed to express what I want to express, I can try to use a graphical approach: at the end, an image tells more than a thousand words.
I try below to show some dimensions that can be obtained from my CV in graphic form, there is not everything (and so has to be), but it was an interesting exercise that I recommend to anyone.
I suggest this exercise because it helps you better understand who you are and what you want people to know about you. In the end, if you don’t know yourself and don’t know how to express your value, hardly an external source will be able to understand it.
The required elements of this exercise are basically: what I want to highlight and how.
Maybe if you try the same exercise, you will find something about yourself as I did.
First of all, I asked myself, what would I like to highlight from my CV?
I chose three domains :
- what is the market I can address
- what I am knowledgeable on
- how international is my experience
The process of building the graphical interface was challenging because it implied a different way to express things, but the reward was a better understanding of who I am, how I am perceived, and in the end, what I would like to do when I grow up.
What is the market, I know?
Usually, a HH or hiring manager reads your cv quickly and then, if you’re lucky, will ask some questions…but he\she\it does not know what does not know, does not have nor your experience nor your knowledge of your strengths. So how to make clear what is your real market experience?
I chose this approach:
This was a surprise to me when I did it; I spanned more than I was conscious in my career (ok, I am old), which is a value if you want to sell yourself as a senior guy.
As arbitrary as the division I made is, looks quite clear I spanned my activities in several areas and different roles, companies, and market. This makes my experience broader and more open.
My goal was to show my layered experience graphically. The nested circles with the feeds were a simple solution; this is better understandable and way more readable than the standard written CV.
I am almost sure this can be represented in some other graphical forms; at the end is just an exercise, so I’m open to suggestions.
But even with the limit in this view, one of the values here is that there is no temporal line; the experience is represented for what I did not when.. from this point of view, this is way more interesting than the usual CV format.
One of the standard CV issues is that the temporal line does not express what you learned and introduces a reading bias that arbitrarily puts a reading key that undermines your potential value. Maybe your latest activity is not the most representative.
What can I do?
The second question that came to my mind when discussing my CV was: ok, what are the things I can do?
This is an exciting topic and requires a double view:
- what the other recognize in me.
- what I think I am good at (or want to highlight)
Working on the exercise, I realized that Linkedin could be the source for the first point since there is a dedicated section so, why do not leverage it?
The result required some stretched graphical activity on a slide, and the work should be better than mine. Still, the output can be useful to understand how people perceive you.
The hyperlinks point to the relative section on Linkedin, so any deep dive is even possible 🙂
The second point is a trade-off between what you think is needed to be presented and what you actually think of yourself.
If you want, this is where you put the things you want to highlight about yourself. It is the most challenging because it requires you to decide what you want to highlight.
It would not be a surprise you find out your strength points do not align with the world’s perception of you. As an example, my knowledge of GDPR was not reported in the LinkedIn skills, even if I am quite active on that. But since I do not want to be a DPO (read my linked article below )https://www.linkedin.com/embeds/publishingEmbed.html?articleId=8926452567889499751
I opted for “data protection” as a skill (and no GDPR is not about privacy, shame on you)
Why could there be this difference? This can be due to different reasons but would worth a little introspective analysis of how you communicate outside your vale (this is the first step, isn’t it? let’s work on this).
While there can be many other domains of your experience you would like to highlight (technical skills, certifications, or whatever), I focused on a specific one: how international is my experience, and how can I pass this domain?
How international is my experience?
Again a double exercise.
Work and family reasons expanded my understanding of the world; therefore, it is important to highlight both.
Addressing this point is crucial if you want to show that you can adapt and work in an international environment with different cultures.
Just on the cover, I made clear the breadth of roles I covered …
The map is useful to show what “world experience” means. This is something that can give even to a distracted eye a glance at what you’re talking about.
Here, the aim was to show the western experience (EU and USA), the APAC experience, and China one. Areas of the world with a dramatic difference in terms of perception, language, rules, behavior…
But this, per se, would not mark the fact I am familiar with different cultures at high degrees. This is why it was worth adding family ties that could make my counterpart aware of my familiarity with culture’s varying peculiarities.
Introducing some personal elements, which usually are not present in an ordinary CV, would enforce and clarify what is your confidence related to different cultures (in my case, span from Europe to Japan, covering North America, the United States, and Mexico, where Mexico also tells I am familiar with Latin countries.
NOTE: Mexico is in North America from a geographical point of view, so everyone who refers to Mexico as south or central America demonstrates not only to not be able to read a map but, worse, do not understand how offensive this can be perceived. And, by the way, this is also the offence that comes out when asian countries are considered as an homogeneous set of cultures.
So I did this exercise for myself, and I found it extremely useful to understand myself better, my experience, goals, and even the value I would like to transmit… It is a complementary tool to a standard CV that talks about yourself.
Maybe by doing it, you will learn as well to better express who you are 🙂
And how many dimensions do you have that you would like to show?
