Ch. 15: Living up to your great CV at interview

In this chapter you will learn how to:

• build your confidence before interview

OK, so you’ve finally finished your CV and your application. Now all the careful presentation and positive spin is complete, you have another fear: Does it all make you sound too good?

When you spend so long writing about how good you are, this can become a problem... you start to feel as if you can’t possibly live up to it at interview. Of course you can! Here’s why:

You wrote it yourself

Being able to live up to and talk confidently about the skills you’ve put down on paper has got to be the biggest benefit to writing your own CV. After all, you’ve:

• done all the background work
• thought carefully about all the times you’ve shown your skills
• put these skill examples into clear, short sentences
• picked the most relevant sentences and included them in a carefully targeted CV
• made sure you’ re comfortable with the words you’ve used
• Read it out loud so it feels easy and familiar when you talk about it.

If you didn’t write your CV yourself, there is a risk it will contain impressive-sounding words that you don’t really relate to. For example, would you ever say the following sentence out loud?

‘Maximizing departmental productivity through visionary leadership aligned to strategic objectives?’

OK, a few people might. But be honest – would you? Even if you would, it’s a hard sentence to repeat confidently under the pressure of an interview.

‘Building motivation by showing everyone in my department how their actions impact the whole company.’

This might be a more natural way to put it. You can remember this second sentence more easily, and are more likely to be able to say it in front of an interviewer without stumbling.

When your CV and the way you speak at interview are really mismatched, a competent interviewer will assume you probably didn’t write your own CV. They might wonder why.
If you did get a professional CV writing service to provide your generic CV, they should tweak it for you until you are happy.

But you should still ask for it as an electronic file, so you can then make any changes to the wording that will help you sound more natural, more like yourself. It also means you can target your CV properly...

The extract above has been taken from 'Get That Job With the Right CV'
Copyright © 2010 Julie Gray

Get That Job With the Right CV